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Republicans went totally nutso on Dr. Anthony Fauci this week, trying to catch him with a perjury trap before the US Senate. They called him names, citied lies and pseudoscience, and attacked his integrity.

He withstood asinine statements like Josh Hawley, in an extraordinary bit of projection, saying:

“You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar! You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime!”

Throughout it all, he retained his composure and refused to take any of their bait.

But the larger story here is what these white supremacist MAGA Republicans were trying to cover up with this deflection strategy.

Libertarian crackpot and fake science fan Rand Paul led this attack, ostensibly designed to sweep the headlines away from dead and dying Americans in Iran, the price of food and rent, and the allegations that Trump was raping children. But the real goal was even more monstrous.

What happened in 2020 can only be called an intentional, racially-based mass murder of American citizens, planned and executed by Donald Trump and Jared Kushner for purely political purposes, and virtually ignored by the American mainstream media.

And these ongoing attacks on Fauci — led by proponents (like Rand Paul) of the discredited, pseudo-science theory that “herd immunity” could have solved the crisis if we only let enough people die from Covid — are part of the effort to whitewash that history.

Here’s what really happened that they don’t want you to remember:

Throughout January and February of 2020, Covid was limited to a few clusters here in the US, all in Blue state cities that were major air hubs like Seattle and New York.

March 2020 was the month when things went to hell here. On March 5th there were 129 known cases and only 11 deaths in the US: just 33 days later, hospitals were using refrigerated trucks as morgues and over 10,000 Americans were dead of Covid.

Fear ran through communities and stalked our homes because nobody yet knew for sure how this disease was transmitted or how deadly it would become.

We were washing our groceries with bleach after picking them up at the store’s parking lot from people wearing masks, goggles, and gloves. We bought up all the air filters in the country. We worked from home when we could. We isolated ourselves from other people as much as was humanly possible.

In March and early April, serious Covid outbreaks were showing up across the Northeast and Trump — who had two years earlier shut down both of the two federal pandemic task forces Obama had put into place after the Ebola scare — charged his son-in-law, nepo-baby slumlord Jared Kushner, with responding to the crisis.

Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses — along with Dr. Fauci — were our new national heroes.

By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. At Fauci’s suggestion, Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 13th, and most of the country shut down during the following week.

The skies and highways fell silent, the Dow collapsed, and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, as Dr. Fauci pointed out, the number one consideration.

Jared Kushner put together a task force of preppie 30-something white men he knew from college to coordinate getting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from Trump buddies and companies close to Republican members of Congress into hospitals.

They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every American household — to slow the pandemic.

But then came April 7th, just one month later, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.

It was followed the day later with the all-caps headline across the top of the front page: BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE BRUNT AS DEATHS CLIMB.

It hit conservative media, Donald Trump, and Jared Kushner like a lightning bolt.

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Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report found, were Black or Hispanic, not white people!

As The New York Times reported on April 7th:

“The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates…

“In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.”

White supremacist Republicans and rightwing media responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”

Rush Limbaugh declared solemnly that afternoon:

“With the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.”

And here it was:

“The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder,” Limbaugh giddily intoned, “harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody: disproportionate representation!”

It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race or Covid: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth, and are also over-represented in low-paid public-facing service jobs where they would more easily catch Covid.

It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course Black people were going to die more frequently from coronavirus.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing April 7th front-page articles about that disparity — followed by it leading the news that night on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox “News” — echoed across the rightwing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed his tune the following day, as documented by Media Matters for America.

Now that Black people were the ones most likely to die if we forced people back to work, Tucker said on April 8th:

“[W]e can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”

“The rest,” of course, were white people. Those “vulnerable citizens” Tucker wanted to get back to work were disproportionately minorities. As a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted:

“Essential workers who needed to work in person, and their family members, were significantly more likely to contract the coronavirus early in the crisis. These essential workers disproportionately earned low wages and were more likely to be people of color.”

On the other hand, salaried workers — overwhelmingly white — were telecommuting. For over a year I did my show from home, for example, as did all my peers at SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and in most media operations around the country. Everywhere that (mostly white) people could work from home, employers were making accommodations.

But Trump wanted the rest of the economy to recover from the election-year shutdown shock quickly because he knew presidents running for reelection during economic bad times almost always lose. He knew that if he wanted to win that November and stay in the White House, that meant getting “essential” workers like transit drivers, store clerks, and people in slaughterhouses back to their jobs.

Particularly if they were Black or Hispanic, as were the majority of these “essential” workers, particularly in meat packing.

(The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 10, 2020, found that among 9,919 cases in 21 states with reported race and ethnicity, 87% of all Covid deaths occurred among racial and ethnic minority workers.)

Brit Hume joined Tucker’s show and, using his gravitas as Fox’s “real news guy,” intoned, in response to the report that mostly Black and Hispanic people were dying:

“The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”

Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was “not quite as dangerous,” but Limbaugh listeners and Fox “News” viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.

Fully 12,677 Americans were dead by that April day, but now that Trump and the rightwing media knew that most of the non-elderly dying people were and would be Black and Hispanic, priorities were suddenly very, very different.

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Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about getting those Black and Hispanic people back to work, even if it meant exposing them to a deadly disease!

On April 12th, just four days after the news that most deaths were Black and Hispanic people in Blue states, Trump retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up and would announce a specific plan to do that “shortly.”

On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commerce published a policy paper titled Implementing A National Return to Work Plan.

The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from Covid-death and -injuries lawsuits.

Three days after that, the white-billionaire-funded Freedomworks and the all-white House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that:

“[I]t’s time to re-open the economy.”

Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “in person” at their state capitols and governor’s mansions, and, for signage, to:

“Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep [the signs looking] homemade.”

One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in nearly-all-white New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with angry white people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.

One that drew particularly high levels of media attention — complete with swastikas, confederate flags, and assault rifles — was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer and her Black Lieutenant General, Garlin Gilchrist.

This was around the time long-standing rightwing white supremacist networks began to awaken and coordinate with each other. They reached out to members of Congress and the Senate and found Republican allies. Trump explicitly encouraged them to require low-wage essential workers to return to their jobs.

Suddenly things began to change as the federal government stopped trying to save lives and started promoting policies that would eventually kill — unnecessarily — at least a half-million Americans with the disproportionately biggest death tolls among working-age Blacks and Hispanics.

NBC News, when they’d gotten hold of April emails from within the White House, ran the headline:

“Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every American a Mask in April, Email Shows.”

When Rachel Maddow reported that meat-packing plants were epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding white community: the sick people were mostly Hispanic and Black.

He essentially said, “No big deal.”

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The Republican meme was now well-established and was being repeated virtually daily on Fox “News” and rightwing talk radio: Working-age white people were far, far less likely to get less sick, more likely to be asymptomatic, or — even if they were unlucky and got sick — most likely to survive a trip to the hospital.

And meat packing plants essential to white Americans’ food supply were places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).

Trump’s response was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meat packing plants, the elderly of all races were dying in nursing homes.

But the death toll among working age affluent white people (who could telecommute and/or were less likely to be obese, have hypertension, or struggle with diabetes) was still relatively low.

It took a lot of pressure off Trump and his Republicans. They could now politicize the virus, and, if they did it right, they could do so publicly with a “wink” to their white supremacist base while blaming it all on Democratic Blue state governors.

And if they could get the economy back to cranking along within the next few months, Trump might be able to pull the 2020 election out of the bag.

As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified white men supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:

“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

That’s right: “An effective political strategy.”

It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Red states, not being coastal travel hubs and generally lightly populated, seemed to have been spared.

And there was an election coming in just a few months, so Trump began explicitly scapegoating Blue state governors for the high death rates.

Just four weeks after Trump changed his policy to force “essential workers” back into their jobs, he went on Fox to argue that Blue states should not get federal assistance because they were mismanaging Covid. As NBC News reported, Trump said:

“It’s not fair to the Republicans, because all the states that need help, they’re run by Democrats in every case. Florida is doing phenomenal. Texas is doing phenomenal. The Midwest is, you know, fantastic…”

He kept at it, for months, leading up to the election in November.

As ABC News reported on September 17, 2020, Trump gleefully pushed Kushner‘s “effective political strategy,” pointing out the low Covid death rates in Red states, adding:

“So we’re down in this [Red state] territory. And that’s despite the fact that the blue states had had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.”

ABC News closed that article with a paragraph noting:

“[Y]esterday was the furthest the president has gone in politicizing the pandemic which has claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 Americans.”

As a result of Trump’s and Kushner‘s “effective political strategy” of forcing Black and Hispanic people to bear the brunt of the deaths while blaming them on Democrats, by year’s end the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Iran); we had about 20% of the world’s Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world’s population.

As the National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine noted in December 2020:

“Approximately 97.9 out of every 100,000 African Americans have died from COVID-19, a mortality rate that is a third higher than that for Latinos (64.7 per 100,000), and more than double than that for whites (46.6 per 100,000)...”

The lasting legacy of Trump’s April 8th change in policy and his encouraging Covid skepticism to get Black and Hispanic people back to work is that today we’re the world’s worst in terms of death and sickness, period.

He’d thrown his unqualified slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner at something even a professional would’ve found the challenge of a lifetime. And then manipulated it to intentionally expose Black and Hispanic people to a deadly disease while helping him in the upcoming 2020 election by going back to work.

More people have died of Covid in America, as a percentage or in absolute terms, than any other developed country in the world.

Why? Because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with getting the economy back on track to win an election over the bodies of dead Black and Hispanic workers and their families, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.

Former Attorney General Kennedy’s grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the administration’s volunteers, who blew the whistle to Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker:

“Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as ‘a marketing genius,’ because, Kennedy said they’d told him, ‘he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the [Blue] states.’”

As that report released from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted in 2022:

“In the first half of 2020, African Americans and Latinos had death rates from coronavirus that far outweighed those of whites. While 62% of the population age 45-54 in 2020 was white, this population accounted for only 22% of coronavirus deaths in that age range. …

“Disparities were even more pronounced in some states such as Louisiana, where in April 2020, African Americans represented 70% of coronavirus deaths despite being only one third of the state’s population.”

And once Trump and Kushner put that death-based reelection strategy into place in April, it became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red state white people started to become infected.

As Trump told Dr. Deborah Birx in mid-April and she reported in her book Silent Invasion: The Untold Story…:

“‘We will never shut down the country again. Never.’ His pupils hardened into points of anger… I felt the blood drain from my face, and I shivered slightly.”

Trump’s change — from Fauci’s policy of prevention to a policy of Rand Paul’s beloved “herd immunity” once he realized on April 7, 2020 that healthy white people were largely immune from death by the coronavirus — put the US on-course to have the worst Covid death rate in the world.

That was the day everything changed because Trump and Kushner were willing to let Black and Hispanic people die on a gamble they could still put the economy back together fast enough to win the 2020 election.

Over a million Americans have died so far, more than any other nation. Multiple studies show that up to 500,000 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if Trump had just promoted masks and lock-downs through the year before the vaccine was available and, since then, if he had condemned the anti-vax movement that emerged in the last months of his presidency.

But he didn’t do either. All because he knew the virus disproportionately killed Black and Hispanic people and he was willing to let human beings die just to win the election.

And sure enough, as Congress reported in December 2022, a massive number of those deaths were — as a clear result of Trump’s policy ­— among Black and Hispanic people.

If that’s not race-based mass slaughter, aka genocide at a Serbian war crimes level, then the phrase has lost much of its meaning.

Now you know the rest of the story, and what’s motivating Republicans like Paul and Hawley to behave so reprehensibly, hoping to cover up their and Trump’s racially-based mass slaughter of Americans.

Pass it along.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Covid Cover-Up Has Begun”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.

The Council itself was packed with Trump with leftovers from rightwing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.

It claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery along with the positive role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and museum curators:

“…have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”

Wild, over-the-top bullshit complaints that our museums are accurately portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire than it seems.

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Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, has rewritten his nation’s history because, as Orwell noted, those who control the past can use it to reprogram the future.

Dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, typically portraying themselves as representing the inevitable culmination of history, as the nation’s savior (“I, alone, can fix it!”), and as the rightful heir to a mythical glorious tradition like Trump is doing by trying to reinvent America as an exclusively white Christian nation.

In the process, they typically erase their rivals (Trump has replaced Biden’s picture in the White House with a photo of an autopen), reframe negatively their political opponents (ditto), and use the threat of erasure from history as a weapon against their own allies to keep them bowing and scraping (ditto).

Dictatorial regimes frequently use rewritten history to justify wars of aggression, suppress minorities, and gut civil liberties. Modern American examples include how Sam Alito cited a 17th century witch-hanging British judge to justify ripping the right to abortion away from women, or how Trump has reinvented (with extensive lies) Obama’s peace deal with Iran to justify his and Netanyahu’s illegal war.

They rewrite history to bind themselves to the country’s majority group with simplified stories of the nation’s “glorious” past, claiming members of that group must rally around them to maintain national unity, strength, and a shared destiny. Diversity, in this context, is seen as a weakness as it doesn’t support this kind of dictatorial framing, which is why Trump called Kamala Harris “a DEI hire” on the campaign trail and has essentially criminalized the phrase.

Rewriting history is also a powerful way to shift the Overton Window to the right, causing the previously unthinkable to become “common sense.” When the history of protest, democratic movements, and civil rights efforts are reframed as chaos or crises in the nation’s history, young people are less likely to engage in them. When citizens fail to learn about successful alternatives to authoritarian rule, it can make democracy or pluralism seem unnatural or even impossible, particularly to young people.

— When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BCE, he rewrote Egyptian history to make himself the son of the god Amun, the seniormost of the gods and arguably the one we acknowledge to this day when we end a prayer by invoking his name.
— Joseph Stalin removed purged officials from photographs, rewrote textbooks, and reshaped official government accounts of the Russian Revolution and WWI to magnify his own role.
— Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime taught a racialized version of German history that portrayed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other racial and political minority groups as enemies and Germany as the victim of a “stabbed in the back” betrayal after World War I.
— Mao Zedong oversaw repeated revisions of Chinese history, especially after the Cultural Revolution, with history textbooks and official records regularly being edited or radically changed to meet his political needs. To this day, for example, they’ve elided the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
— Even small-timers like Saddam Hussein do this; he linked himself to ancient Mesopotamian rulers and promoted a personality cult through museums, monuments, giant banners with his face on them hanging from federal buildings, and school curricula.

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The simple reality is that in democracies it’s historians, journalists, courts, archives, universities, and scholars who write history and can challenge official narratives. Debate is expected, and interpretations can change as new evidence comes to light, like we saw here recently with the 1619 Project.

In dictatorships, on the other hand, the state typically monopolizes education, media, and archives, suppresses competing interpretations of history, and punishes those who publicly contradict the official version.

All of which is why it’s so important that we don’t treat the efforts by Trump and his neofascist lickspittles to rewrite America’s history into a sanitized white male supremacist mold as if it’s just some sort of aberration or sick joke.

This is serious stuff, and serious people within this administration are dedicated to destroying our and — particularly — our children’s understanding of the truly revolutionary and progressive history of this nation.

They’re trying to induce a national amnesia, stretching back through the history of the Klan, the Civil War, and even the American Revolution.

We must push back against them boldly and loudly, and when they’re gone we’re going to have a huge job cleaning up the fascist mess they’re making.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Who Owns History Owns America”

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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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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Trump and the GOP are desperate to hang onto the oligarchy they’ve created, particularly in the face of the upcoming elections. Increasingly — as oligarchies usually do when they decide it’s acceptable to use violence to hang onto power — they’re turning to hate, fear, and terror as their tools. To this end, Trump and his lickspittles are reinventing the old Confederate slave patrols in modern form.

Most recently, ICE has begun violently force-feeding and catheterizing people in ICE concentration camps when they protest conditions or the absence of due process by going on hunger strikes.

Being tied down and having a tube shoved up your nose and down your gagging throat to your stomach is painful and degrading, as is having a catheter pushed up through your urethra and into your bladder because you’re now tied to a bed (to prevent you from pulling out the feeding tube) and can no longer get up to use the bathroom.

Force-feeding like this is a violation of the 1975 Treaty of Tokyo and condemned by the World Medical Association. It is considered torture by the international community

Citing the example of Mahatma Gandhi’s successful hunger strike against the British government then occupying India, the Red Cross and United Nations have recognized an absolute right to hunger strike as a legitimate form of legal protest. ICE doesn’t care.

ICE has also turned its attention far beyond immigrants. It’s buying surveillance and hacking services from companies like Palantir, Cellebrite, and Paragon, and drawing on sprawling surveillance networks that include Flock license-plate reader systems, facial recognition, cellphone forensics, and commercial data brokers, creating an infrastructure capable of tracking virtually anyone in America.

This is how nations or regions turn into police states to protect their oligarchs from popular rage and unpredictable elections, and the key to the transition is expanding the reach of the fascist regime’s internal enforcers by getting both local police departments and even volunteers to cooperate or participate.

This is not new in America.

By the 1840s when the Confederate states had pretty much ceased to function as democracies but had turned into overt oligarchies run by a few thousand fabulously rich families, slave patrols were their main means of controlling the population, including white people.

The slave patrol groups cut deals with local police departments to reimburse them when they helped arrest runaway slaves or punished white people opposed to either slavery or oligarchy. The system went national with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

That law allowed police seizing persons accused of being fugitive slaves to ignore the Constitution’s requirements for proof in court and a trial by jury as well as largely abandoning many Fourth Amendment protections for people suspected of harboring enslaved persons. It also paid a “commission” of $10 (about $450 in today’s money) for every enslaved person the local police or the federal commissioners successfully sent back into bondage.

Following that same strategy, over 760 local police agencies have now signed up for a task force model tying them to ICE spanning 1,493 active agreements, deputizing between 13,800 and 15,800 local officers to assist ICE.

And they’re just getting started; right now, only 77.2 million people (32% of the country) live in a county with an enrolled agency. ICE is promising full salaries, overtime, startup costs, and performance bonuses tied to immigration arrests: affiliated local police officers are now directly rewarded financially for arresting Hispanic or Black people suspected of being immigrants and turning them over to ICE, often regardless of the arrestee’s status or citizenship.

Meanwhile, ICE and these contracted local police believe they’re free to ignore the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a judicial warrant before crashing a door or car window or executing an arrest. They similarly ignore the Fifth Amendment’s requirement that, “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

Virtually none of the roughly 70,000 human beings now being held in brutal conditions by for-profit prison companies have ever been before a real Article III judge, as the Constitution requires.

And, like the old slave patrols, ICE is now going after people who aren’t even suspected of being undocumented but, instead, are merely protesting ICE’s violence, anonymity, abuses and excesses.

In addition to shooting dead Americans like Pretti and Good, a joint ProPublica and Frontline review identified more than 300 American citizen protesters and bystanders arrested during immigration sweeps and accused of assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.

This pattern of abusing our First Amendment right to protest even hits candidates and officeholders, including an Illinois congressional candidate indicted on conspiracy and impeding charges over protests outside the Broadview facility. Professor Erik Davis, for example, was recently arrested and chained for attending anti-ICE meetings in Minneapolis: they’re now using conspiracy laws against protestors, and he’s facing years in prison.

The point is to create an immediate reign of terror, damping protest in ways similar to how the slave patrols prevented eruptions of anti-oligarch sentiment in the Old South. They’ll spray pepper right into your eyes, shoot you in the face with chemical weapons, beat you to the ground, and even shoot you in the back of the head.

A day after Trump said Republicans should nationalize voting, Steve Bannon called on Trump to use these same masked thugs to surround voting sites this fall. Bannon separately claimed that the deployment of ICE agents to airports was “perfect training” for the elections this fall.

The former plumber and DHS Secretary who oversees ICE, Markwayne Mullin, said at his confirmation that ICE could be sent to polling places in the event of a “specific threat.” ICE has since told a court it may hold “thousands of documents” responsive to a demand for its “polling-place plans” but, so far, has produced exactly none.

Meanwhile, the number of cases where actual criminals are pretending to be ICE agents so they can rob, rape, or beat up people of color has exploded.

A hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting “ICE! ICE!” The man raised his hands, thinking he was being arrested. Instead, four assailants robbed the house at gunpoint, pistol-whipped one resident so hard that his split forehead required ten stitches and four staples, and pointed a gun at a baby while demanding cash from the infant’s terrified parents.

They weren’t ICE. They weren’t police. They were criminals who had figured out that in Trump’s America, all you need to terrorize an immigrant family with impunity is a mask, a gun, a camo outfit you can buy on Amazon, and a loud enough shout.

NBC News and Noticias Telemundo published a sweeping investigation documenting how that Greensboro robbery was not an isolated horror. Reviewing court records, police reports, and news accounts from across the country, they found 31 separate cases in 2025 of criminals impersonating ICE agents to commit violent crimes as of May, up from an average of just five per year over the previous decade.

That’s a 484 percent increase in a single year.

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As NBC News reported:

“In mid-January, a man broke into a house in Pittsburgh claiming to be an ICE agent and threatening a teen with a knife. In February, police in San Diego said a man allegedly impersonated an officer and wrapped his arms around the neck of a restaurant manager, claiming the manager was in the country illegally and he was going to arrest him.”

In New York, a Dominican woman was dragged into a basement, beaten, and raped by a man claiming to be an immigration agent. In North Carolina, another woman was raped at her workplace by a fake agent. In Philadelphia, an armed man claiming to be ICE and wearing a vest marked “Security Enforcement Agent” zip-tied a fifty-year-old Dominican cashier and robbed his business.

Most recently, here in Oregon just a few days ago a driver in Marion County was pulled over on Highway 211 by an SUV with blue flashing lights. The driver was dragged out of their car and, after a 20-minute robbery and beating, released; they required hospitalization for their injuries (we don’t yet know the person’s identity details). Portland’s Channel 6 (KOIN) reported:

“The suspects were described as wearing boots, baseball caps, face coverings and green long-sleeved shirts. They also wore tactical vests with the word ‘POLICE’ in white lettering and carried badges marked with the word ‘Police,’ OSP said, noting the suspect vehicle was described as a newer-model small SUV that is blue or gray in color, with no visible license plates.”

The FBI quietly warned in an internal bulletin last October that this was happening, but the administration’s response has been to keep the bulletin on the QT (most of the attacks are on undocumented Hispanics and are apparently never reported) while telling ICE agents to stay masked up.

Police states don’t solely rule by their own decree; at its peak, the German Gestapo under Hitler only had 32,000 members nationwide. But civilian militias and local police across Germany had signed up to help and as their mandate extended from lawbreakers and communists to Jews and protestors, everybody else just came along.

Increasingly, Democratic politicians are calling for abolishing or reforming ICE. The perverse incentive structure that gives billions to private for-profit prisons to hold immigrants is creating millions in campaign donations and gifts for Republican politicians, but communities are starting to speak out against this growing network of what are functionally concentration camps (the distinction being that prisons are for people who’ve been through court and had their due process rights respected).

And the last time masked police appeared on our streets in a widespread fashion was the post-Reconstruction era when cities across the South (and more than a few in the North) were deputizing hooded Klan members to enforce segregation. (The police officers in Mississippi who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were all Klan members.)

Trump and the GOP, however, are loathe to give up their secret police, apparently secure in the belief that the system will never turn on them or their families and they can use it to intimidate us all into both silence and avoiding the polls this November.

Clearly, they’ve never read history.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Return of the Slave Patrols”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Trump’s most recent desperate attempt to change the subject from his involvement with Epstein, Iran, Netanyahu, and the billions he and his grifter sons are making with their skeezy schemes is to call progressive Democrats “communists.” He’s even gone so far as to suggest that some should be stripped of their citizenship and deported or thrown into one of his ICE concentration camps.

Meanwhile, open conflict is erupting within the Democratic Party around populist issues. So-called “moderate” Democrats are defending their dependence on corporate and AIPAC money to win elections and arguing for maintaining the status quo that Citizens United has established by legalizing political bribery.

The most recent example is how Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — whose father was CEO of Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan back in the day — has endorsed Congresswoman Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed in the upcoming primary in that state. El-Sayed, a public health official, has worked for Medicare for All his entire career; he even wrote a book about it, Medicare For All: A Citizens Guide. Stevens, a recipient of corporate money, opposes the program.

El-Sayed summarized the situation with a remarkably clear and straightforward statement that highlights the conundrum facing Democratic Party leadership trying to advance elections for both factions:

“I think in this race, at the end of the day, it tends to be that candidates who generally have been funded the same way will tend to go together. Those of us who don’t take corporate money tend to stick together. Those who have taken corporate money for most of their careers tend to stick together.”

The media isn’t helping Democrats work through this. CNN’s Dana Bash asked House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday about what the Party’s policy positions would be if they regained control of the House or Senate this fall:

“Your party is fighting over whether the path back to the majority runs through the center or the activist left who want to defund the police, abolish ICE, end aid to Israel, [have] open borders…”

Sweet Jesus. When a real, educated, credentialed reporter can’t distinguish between a teenager with a TikTok account or a looney tunes narcissist from the DSA and the positions held by actual progressive Democratic politicians, things are really grim. (Or maybe Dana is just pre-sucking-up to the Ellisons?)

Yes, the co-chair of the DSA recently went on Fox “News” this week and called for a bunch of stupid policies like abolishing the Senate, ending national borders, and shutting down all our prisons. And, yes, Republicans will be pounding on this, trying to suggest that she was speaking for the Democratic Party.

But she was not. The DSA is not the Democratic Party, and even Democratic Party candidates who endorse “democratic socialism” are not endorsing the DSA or its positions.

There’s literally not a single actual elected Democrat who’s ever called for “open borders” (that’s actually the position of the far-right Libertarian Party) and other than the occasional call for police reform following the murder of George Floyd, none are calling for “defunding the police.” Lefty icon Bernie Sanders, for goodness sake, said, “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.”

Even Republicans (Senators John Thune and Roger Wiker) are making a case for ending military aid to Israel, and a recent YouGov poll found that more than half of all Americans want to abolish ICE and replace it with a more professional and transparent agency to enforce our immigration laws.

So, let’s set the record straight. There’s not a single “far left” progressive position held by actual elected progressive Democratic politicians that has less than 50% support among the Democratic base, most have well over 80% support, and virtually all are supported above 50% by the majority of Americans of all political stripes.

This isn’t “far left”: it’s the radical middle! We’ve been “radicalized” by 45 years of neoliberal policies by both parties that have gutted the American middle class and the American Dream, and want actual fighters who’ll make our country safe for working people again.

We want politicians who’ll return us to the ideal of a single full-time paycheck, regardless of educational attainment, paying enough to buy a house, a car every few years, take an annual vacation, put our kids through college, and have a comfortable retirement.

Two-thirds of us had that when Reagan was sworn into office in 1981 and launched the Republican War on Working People™. Hell, that’s the “Square Deal” that Teddy Roosevelt campaigned on over 100 years ago, and the vast majority of Americans still want it!

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While corporate-money-dependent Democrats may oppose Medicare for All or ending student debt or taxing the rich in a meaningful way, progressive Democrats — the ones being vilified right now by Trump, the GOP, the media, and their own on-the-take peers — are clear about most all of their positions. They are that:

— Every worker should have the right to democracy in their workplace (a union), and that nobody who works full time should have to live in poverty because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up in a stupid amount of time.

— Retired people shouldn’t have to pay income taxes on their Social Security (the way it was before Reagan and, no, Trump did not fix that), that morbidly rich people should pay into the system like the rest of us, that Social Security should pay enough to live modestly on, and that Medicare should cover all our expenses with minimum hassle.

— Every American citizen should be able to vote without a hassle, and taking away your vote should require a judge’s action to prove why, just like the Supreme Court has ruled it now works if a state wants to take away your gun.

— Speaking of guns, it’s obscene that the leading cause of death for our children is bullets, and we shouldn’t have to regularly terrorize our children with active shooter drills. We need rational gun control laws, like every other developed country in the world has.

— It’s crazy that one man owns more wealth than the bottom half of America (165 million of us) and he and his peers typically pay less of their income in taxes than your average teenager. If we want the general prosperity of the 1950s, we should have the same tax rate that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower so loved: 90% on the morbidly rich after they’ve made their first few million dollars a year.

— Our children and grandchildren deserve a world where they needn’t fear being killed by climate-change-driven wild weather, drought, or wildfires, and the air and water are clean. And it’s nuts that we’re subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that’s preventing this.

— Every other country in the world helps their young people go to college; in most it’s as cheap as it was here in the 1960s when you could put yourself through school with a weekend job. Some countries even pay people to go to college, like the $100/month stipend my dad had with the GI Bill after WWII that built our 20th century scientific and business prowess. And it’s morally and politically wrong to cripple entire generations with trillions in student debt.

— Across the 34 richest (OECD) countries in the world, over a half-million families are wiped out every year because somebody got sick. All of those families are here in America. Healthcare should be a right, like in every other developed country in the world, instead of a privilege that depends on how much money you make.

— Starting a small family business, once the backbone of every American town and city, should once again be possible; we need to break up the massive monopolies that have come to dominate every single industry. See: Republican Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

— Every person in America should be free to practice their own religion (or, like Thomas Paine, no religion) and raise their kids that way without government interference, government promotion, or their tax dollars subsidizing local megachurches’ religious schools. Like the Constitution says.

— People should be judged, hired, and promoted based on the quality of their minds, their work, and their integrity, not the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their religion.

— Women should have the same rights and privileges as men, from the workplace to the boardroom to the doctor’s office to the voting booth.

— Our queer brothers and sisters should have the same rights and privileges as everybody else and be free to live their lives without discrimination or harassment.

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— America is a nation of immigrants, and we have been strengthened in every generation by the diversity of talent and humanity that have come here to participate in the American dream. We need comprehensive immigration reform to clean up our system, not a brutal regime that’s literally killing people while it tears our nation apart.

— And it’s completely insane that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court would say that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech, which is why most Democrats think Citizens United needs to be overturned.

Sadly, many of the corporate-dependent Democrats oppose many of these positions because they’d conflict with the interests of their donors. This is something the Party needs to work out, particularly as voters increasingly make their desires known in primary elections. But few of these positions would have been alien to FDR or LBJ; most are simply a call for a return to the middle.

It’s frankly astounding that Jeffries didn’t explode when Bash threw out all those disingenuous GOP talking points (I sure would have!), but he politely steered the conversation back to affordability and generally spoke well of his progressive peers and candidates. That’s his job, of course.

And it’s also our job. With the billions that’ll be spent this year to convince Americans that progressives are communists who want to abolish the police and have open borders, not to mention the billionaire-owned-media dialing the echo machine up to 11, it falls on us to educate our friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

America needs to break from the past 45 years of bipartisan neoliberalism and once again embrace the values that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson succeeded in putting into law and Republicans and corporate Democrats have been systematically dismantling since 1981 as they brag about “ending welfare as we know it” and “the era of big government is over.”

Average American voters have largely succeeded in waking up to these scams; now it’s our job to infiltrate and wake up the Democratic Party itself. Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “If this is Communism, Then Teddy Roosevelt was a Communist”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this.

One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.

This is not a new idea in American politics. From Andrew Jackson’s spoils system to Boss Tweed (the morbidly rich oligarch who ruled 19th century’s New York with an iron fist) to the nakedly authoritarian rule within the Confederate states between 1835 and 1865, we’ve had more than our fair share of autocrats who’ve corrupted or even paused democracy to the benefit of themselves and their friends.

But now Trump and his reichwing lickspittles have turned this form of occasional/historical corruption into an entire philosophy of governance.

Imagine, for a moment, if either Presidents Clinton or Obama had announced that they were only going to send government subsidies, emergency aid, and funding to states that voted for them in the previous presidential election. The outrage would have come fast and furious, and the media reaction would have been explosive.

This is purely a thought experiment, though, because no president of either party in the modern era ever had the temerity to try such a nakedly corrupt misuse of government funds.

Until Trump.

The Trump administration cancelled billions in green energy grants over the past months, and, it turns out, with a single exception all of the cancelled grants were in Blue states.

The New York Times caught it in a one-day story that was barely mentioned by the rest of our corporate media; when forced to tell the truth in a lawsuit, the general counsel for the Department of Energy (DOE) came right out and said, explicitly:

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants). …

“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.” (emphasis added)

The filing came after Energy Secretary and fracking oligarch Chris Wright lied under oath to Congress that the cancellations had no political bias in the roughly $7.5 billion gutted across 223 projects in 16 states.

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(While Republicans are claiming that Jack Smith “lied to Congress” and should therefore go to prison, there’s no such similar call for consequences for Wright, either from Republicans or our flaccid Democratic leadership.)

On top of that, we now also find that this administration is passing out FEMA disaster funds based on how states voted for or against Trump, as the hard-right CATO Institute documented from the first Trump administration; he’s now back at it again, and this time 25 states and DC are suing.

Additionally, Trump is blocking a billion dollars in Medicaid payments to Blue states, claiming there’s “fraud” there. This as he pardoned over 70 people convicted of healthcare fraud including a $1.3 billion theft from Medicare.

This is how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. How Erdoġon runs Turkey. How Modi is administering India. And how pretty much every third-world tinpot dictatorship in the world works: “Give us your loyalty and we’ll shower you with gifts; stand against us and you’ll be punished.”

And it’s not just the Trump administration that’s ripping up the idea of equal protection and representation under the law that the 5th and 14th Amendments proclaim; Republican-run states across the nation are enthusiastically defying their own citizens just to enrich the oligarchs and industries that feather their nests:

— In Oklahoma, voters expanded Medicaid themselves by ballot initiative in 2020, so Republican Governor Kevin Stitt answered on Memorial Day weekend 2025 by signing SB 1027, which caps the signatures any single county can contribute at 11.5 percent of that county’s last gubernatorial turnout for statutory measures and 20.8 percent for constitutional ones, effectively locking out the millions of Oklahomans who live in the dark blue Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.

— In South Dakota, Republicans passed a bundle of restrictions in 2025 that closed the petition window by moving the filing deadline from May to February, and then put the oligarch-supported Amendment L on the ballot for this November, which would raise the bar for amending the constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent of votes cast.

— In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and the GOP-run legislature passed HB 1205, which let county elections officials redefine the “actual cost” of validating each signature and jack the fee up to $4.57 per petition in a county like Palm Beach, from under a dollar before: the result was exactly what they wanted, with all 22 active citizen initiatives failing to qualify for the 2026 ballot.

— In Missouri, working people had killed the GOP’s phony “right to work” law by 67 percent in August 2018 and won paid sick leave with 58 percent of the statewide vote in November 2024. So, Republican Governor Mike Kehoe signed the repeal of both eight months later, and voters now face Amendment 4 on the August 4 ballot, which would require a citizen-initiated amendment to win a majority in every one of the state’s eight congressional districts while leaving the Republican-controlled legislature’s own amendments free to pass on a simple statewide majority.

Over the short-term, this sort of corruption works to the advantage of the party using it, and to the detriment of any party that refuses to play the game. As a result, the Democratic Party — which hasn’t endorsed such corruption since the days of Boss Tweed — is effectively bankrupt with a debt of around $2 million as we head into the most important election in our lifetimes.

But the Republican Party — which openly embraces such crude, bare-assed corruption — is sitting on $130 million (almost entirely from oligarchs and giant corporations) and Trump has a SuperPAC with over $400 million (ditto).

None of this could have happened if five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court hadn’t completely altered the rules of our politics with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, both based on a complete lie told by a wealthy conservative Supreme Court clerk over 140 years ago (as I document in detail in Who Killed the American Dream?).

It’s as if they’re trying to create a new Civil War here in America. Seriously: history tells us that corruption and regional/political favoritism is one of the leading forces causing civil unrest and often signals or provokes the end of democracy in a nation.

— The 1971 civil war and genocide in Pakistan that resulted in Bangladesh forming and splitting away was caused by a corrupt Pakistani government reducing to as little as 20 percent of central development spending monies for the eastern part of the country — which held 60 percent of the population — keeping the rest for themselves in the west.

— In Northern Ireland, thirty years of killings were provoked by unionist-run councils allocating public housing and municipal jobs by party loyalty, as Britain’s own Cameron Commission concluded in 1969.

— When Nigerian politicians unfairly allocated that nation’s oil revenue it led to a famine that killed three million people and led to Biafra splitting away as a separate republic.

— Sudan’s ruling clique similarly ran the national budget as a spoils system for its own region and lost a third of the country to South Sudan (I was there during the civil war).

Research published in the American Political Science Review found that while a generalized rich-versus-poor inequality can tear a society apart, regional inequality is the number one predictor of social and political upheaval and the consequent destruction of democracy in a nation.

The “winning” side begins to more aggressively rig the system to protect their own privileges and keep themselves out of jail, while the “losing” side mobilizes to protest the inequality.

As both double-down on their positions and word spreads about how some regions are being screwed while others get rich, the body politic is thrown into turmoil.

Like we’re seeing right now in America.

A federal judge has already ruled that stripping these billions of green energy dollars exclusively from Blue states is a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, but Wright and Trump did it anyway and are making no apologies or corrections.

We must put a stop to this now; while these cancelled green energy, Medicaid, and FEMA projects are merely three examples of increasingly widespread Trump and GOP corruption, they should still become a national scandal if for no other reason than that they feed this deadly process of regional resentment and political alienation.

Call your member of Congress and your senators and demand to know what they’re going to do about these clear, corrupt, and dangerous violations of our Constitution and the political norms that democracy requires. The number for the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Light the Fuse”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.

We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy 3 times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working class people ahead of the oligarchs.

This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief are taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.

First, some background.

While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.

But there were real oligarchs in American in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.

In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:

“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”

It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.

In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.

Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region.

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By the early 1850s they’d outlawed democracy, rigging elections, imprisoning or killing pro-democracy newspaper writers and publishers, and turning their slave patrols against even white men who dared challenge their power.

In 1861, after declaring their independence from the United States, they turned their guns on the rest of America in an effort to finally end democracy on this continent. Abraham Lincoln defeated them and reestablished (a still-imperfect) democracy in America.

Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the part of the gilded era known as the Roaring 20s.

President Grover Cleveland had pointed to its early stages, warning Americans:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

The oligarchs’ excesses, though, crashed the economy leading to the Republican Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He challenged his era’s oligarchs head-on, saying, “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”

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With his New Deal and his 90% top income tax rate he broke them, and both reestablished our democracy as well as building the first middle class in world history that was more than half of a nation’s population.

So here we are now, eighty-one years after the end of World War II, and the oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. As President Jimmy Carter told me ten years ago on my radio program:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors...”

And now we learn that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall’s election in 102 days, as if embracing the mentality of the old Confederate oligarchs who’d essentially outlawed voting by anybody who may have opposed them.

Since taking office, Trump has:

— Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,
— Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,
— Disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,
— Gutted the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center,
— Shuttered the State Department’s counter-disinformation office,
— Reduced the Justice Department’s voting rights section from 30 lawyers to 3,
— Fired the head of the NSA Cyber Command who caught indications of Russian meddling,
— Left the Federal Election Commission (FEC) without a quorum,
— And this month fired every remaining commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) just four months before the midterms.

Something big is up, and they’re not even bothering to be subtle about it.

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Yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergy Lavrov in the Phillipines; Trump’s been having hour-plus-long phone conversations with Putin on average every two weeks since his inauguration; and FBI director Ka$h Patel is planning a trip to Russia a month before the election.

Russia, of course, intervened massively in the 2016 election, Trump’s “Russia, Russia, Russia” attempts at minimizing their role notwithstanding.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump criminally trying to obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

Robert Mueller’s two-volume report found that Russia had attacked the 2016 election in what he called a “sweeping and systematic fashion,” through the Internet Research Agency’s social media operation and the GRU’s hacking of Democratic emails, and that the Trump campaign “expected to benefit from the stolen material.”

The second volume laid out roughly ten episodes of criminal obstruction of justice committed by Trump, and Mueller only declined to prosecute Trump because Justice Department policy barred indicting a sitting president, writing that while the report doesn’t conclude the president committed a crime, it also doesn’t exonerate him.

Along the way his team criminally charged 34 individuals and three Russian companies, including 26 Russian nationals and six former Trump advisers, and won eight convictions or guilty pleas from Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Alex van der Zwaan, and Richard Pinedo, with five of them sentenced to prison. Trump later pardoned five of those eight.

The problem Trump and his morbidly rich oligarch buddies are facing is that oligarchy — including the oligarchy they’ve reestablished here, where the needs of average Americans are gutted as the top 1% are taking deep dives into their money bins — is always a transitional form of government.

Throughout centuries of modern history, oligarchy has rarely lasted more than a single generation. When people realize that the oligarchs have taken over their government and are bleeding average working people dry, they push back hard.

Which forces the oligarchs and the government they control to choose one of two options: give in and revert back to democracy, keeping some or much of their riches but allowing a middle class to re-emerge, or come down hard on the people with an iron fist and crush the opposition.

In Hungary this year, that oligarchy chose the former path, as did the oligarchs in America in 1933. In Russia, Putin chose the latter path, as did Egypt’s el-Sisi and Turkey’s Erdoğan (among others).

In apparent preparation, Trump is building a massive masked secret police force worthy of the Shah’s SAVAK, he’s building detention centers as fast as humanly possible, he’s identified people who “oppose” “traditional American views” as “domestic terrorists” along with anybody he labels “Antifa,” and is now openly calling Democrats communists and has suggested some should be deported or imprisoned.

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Yesterday, Republicans (with the help of 13 turncoat Democrats: Reps. Kathy Castor, Henry Cuellar, Don Davis, Jared Golden, Vicente Gonzalez, Josh Gottheimer, Marcy Kaptur, Susie Lee, Jared Moskowitz, Chris Pappas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Darren Soto, and Derek Tran) passed legislation out of the House that would make it wildly more difficult for millions of low-income Americans and married women who’ve changed their names to vote.

Reporter and statistician Greg Palast has documented — using nothing but official government figures — that the 2024 Republican voter suppression efforts prevented around 4 million American citizens from either voting or having their votes counted; had that GOP effort been unsuccessful, Kamala Harris would today be president and Democrats would control the House and probably the Senate.

This time, it appears, they’re trying to disenfranchise millions more, and given the flaccidity of Democratic leadership’s response it appears they’ll pull much of it off. Those same Dem leaders, after all, allowed all that suppression to happen in 2024 — over loud objections by people like Stacy Abrams who were documenting it in real time — with nary a peep in the press.

Imagine how Republicans would have reacted if the documentary evidence actually showed Democrats had stolen a national election from them!

Which leaves it to us. The only way out of this will be for us to show up this fall in massive numbers, to refuse to be intimidated or frightened away from the polls, and to support folks like Marc Elias who are fighting voter suppression every step of the way.

Pass it along. This may be America’s last chance to preserve the democracy we’ve shed so much blood and treasure to gain and keep these past two-and-a-half centuries.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Fourth Assault”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

In his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:

“America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

Apparently “dreadful fear and hate” have won. A new Lloyd’s Register (the institution dates back to the 1760s) Global Risk Poll of citizens of 140 countries around the world found that one-in-ten (10%) Americans say that politics represents the biggest risk in their lives (above disease and accidents, even).

The average across the other 139 countries was around 1 percent of people who worried politics could harm them (there were a few exceptions; 5 percent of Russians said the same).

And, indeed, our politics can harm us.

There’s the fear of physical violence if you go out in public with a “F*ck Trump” tee shirt or cap or similar bumper sticker, the fear of losing your healthcare this November when the Republican Big Beautiful Bill cuts to Medicaid kick in, the fear of losing your Medicare as the GOP works to strangle and privatize the system with their “Medicare Advantage” scam, the fear of Republicans killing or “reforming” Social Security so they can hand it off to the big banks that own them.

Not to mention the GOP-led campaign to turn our environment over to the fossil fuel industry, our forests over the lumber industry, our streams and water over to the chemical industry, our farms over to the pesticide industry, our children over to the radical Christian school industry, and our economy over to the crypto industry.

Our Republican politicians and the billionaire-owned media that supports them are also constantly telling us who to hate and fear.

If it’s not Willie Horton it’s migrant caravans, Muslim bombers, murderer/rapist “illegals,” or, in 2024, trans people. For this election cycle, Trump, Rubio, Vance, and Miller are telling us we should hate and fear the guy mowing your lawn as well as democratic socialists and “communists.”

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Politics is supposed to help and support us, not rip us off, terrify us, or exploit us, but ever since the Reagan Revolution that’s pretty much all that’s happened.

Republican opposition to real reforms has kept student debt sky-high, housing in the hands of Wall Street hedge funds, health insurance rates out of reach for many, child-care unaffordable, and even caused the national system of gleaming new hospitals and public schools that Eisenhower and Kennedy established across America with their 90% top income tax rate to deteriorate or even shut down.

But why? And what can we do about it?

The era from the 1930s to the 1980s was the most prosperous either America or the world had ever seen. Our top 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich and 50% income tax rate on corporations paid down our national debt from WWII to a mere $800 billion (less than $1 trillion!) when Reagan came into office, all while funding massive programs across America.

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They included power systems like the TVA and Hoover Dam, public schools, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, Public Broadcasting, Head Start, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing projects and VA home loans, hundreds of new airports and train stations, and thousands of smaller efforts. '

The American middle class was the first in world history to reach half the population of any nation; because of FDR’s New Deal, when Reagan came into office fully two-thirds of us were in it, most with a high school diploma and a single paycheck. (Today it’s around 45 percent of us, and it takes two full-time paychecks and a college degree to get there.)

But the morbidly rich self-described “Makers” chafed at having to pay all those taxes to support programs for the working class “Takers” of society, so when Lewis Powell gave them a plan in 1971 to rise up and crush the New Deal and Great Society and turn America into an oligarchy with them in charge, they leaped at it.

They created networks of influential think tanks like Heritage and American Enterprise, media monsters with rightwing TV networks and over 1500 rightwing radio stations, funded universities and seminars, brought corporations and legislators together with ALEC and others, founded and/or funded the Libertarian Party and the Federalist Society, and set out to seize control of the GOP.

It took a few decades, but their bet paid off; several of America’s billionaires are today richer than any human being who’s ever walked on planet Earth, from the days of the Pharaohs to the kings of the 17th century.

The problem the billionaires and the Republicans they own faced, though, was that most Americans loved what those oligarchs called “socialism.” We embraced Social Security, unionization, and the minimum wage with a gusto. We sent our kids to free colleges across the country. We cheered when LBJ got Medicaid and Medicare passed into law over the majority opposition of the GOP in the Senate.

And when oligarchs like David Koch ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform of ending all of those programs and even shutting down our public school system, all to pay for tax breaks for his billionaires and corporations, they failed. Koch only got about a million votes that year.

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So, when Reagan took office they decided that since Americans wouldn’t vote for oligarchy but instead really only wanted “socialism,” the best solution was to so terrify Americans of our neighbors that hate and fear would overwhelm self-interest.

It worked 45 years ago when Reagan railed against “hippie brats“ and “that young buck ahead of you in the grocery line buying steak with his food stamps,” and they’re still doing it!

As Axios reported last week, “Republicans admit the GOP’s midterm forecast is bleak.” But they’re clinging to two goals; suppress the vote with the SAVE Act, all while whipping up voters’ fear and loathing of Democrats:

“‘It’s going to be a hate election,’ a Republican tied to President Trump’s political operation told Axios. ‘Voters have to hate the Dems more than they hate us. And we have material to work with.’”

The simple fact is that since 1981, when the Reagan Revolution kicked off, there hasn’t been even one single piece of major legislation passed through the US Congress that was written by Republicans and passed by a majority of Republicans and signed by a Republican president whose major beneficiary was the average American.

Seriously, not one in 45 years. I know, because for the past 23 years I’ve run a contest on my radio show for anybody who can identify any such Republican legislative unicorn, and none have won.

The problem is, though, that with so much of our media and intellectual atmosphere controlled by billionaires and their money, most Americans don’t know this. They think that Republicans — because they’re so tight with billionaires and big business — must know how to run an economy, even though ten of the last 11 recessions happened on Republican presidencies, most following giant tax cuts for billionaires, and those high-end tax cuts by Reagan, Bush, and Trump have collectively added over $34 trillion to our national debt.

So how do we dial back the hate and fear, particularly when the GOP is openly bragging to reporters that it’s worked so well for them in the past that they’re going to double down on it this year?

Expose them.

When they try to use hate, label it: “That’s hate-mongering. It’s beneath you.” Tell them you’re disgusted by their efforts to divide us by gender identity, race, religion, region, and nationality. Point out that they’re promoting bigotry, and history tells us that never ends well.

Inform people.

Show them how, since 1933, Democrats have written into law every major federal protection or benefit for working Americans, from Social Security, the minimum wage, and the right to unionize to Medicare, Medicaid, workplace safety, environmental and consumer protections, civil and voting rights, food assistance, Pell Grants, the Affordable Care Act, and beyond.

Without Democratic (and Eisenhower’s) legislative efforts over the past century, there literally would not be an American middle class of any consequence.

And quote Republican President Eisenhower — the last honest Republican president since the Reagan Revolution handed the party to the billionaires — when he wrapped up the last sentence of his farewell address with a prayer:

“We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

Louise’s Daily Song; “Fear Factory”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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We have a lot of metaphors for it; the camel’s nose under the tent, the foot in the door, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the handwriting on the wall, among others. Every police state in history started this way. As the White House declared last week in a press release:

“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

First, they built the infrastructure based on what the public widely perceived as a real public safety and economic problem.

People had been pouring into the United States for centuries, looking for economic opportunity and a new life. Some were criminals, and Trump and the GOP highlighted their presence as the reason why it was so imperative to “build the wall” to seal the border and then begin aggressive mass deportations.

The majority of Americans (81% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats) rated border security as “important” in 2016, so Trump began by building his wall and expanding the detention centers that pre-existed from Reagan’s 1981 opening of them to detain Black Haitian refugees. (CoreCivic got its first immigration detention contract in 1981, GEO Group was founded in 1984.)

The story Trump campaigned on and used as an excuse to massively expand arrests and detentions was the widely popular notion that they were hunting down and imprisoning “the worst of the worst.” Even many Hispanics voted for him thinking he would clean up their neighborhoods of criminals.

Trump rarely referenced immigrants without including words like “rapists” and “murderers”: he kicked off his 2016 campaign with such a speech after coming down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Then came the first policy turn that showed the lie and exposed what may have been their plan all along. Instead of arresting immigrants who’d committed crimes (or were even accused of having committed crimes), they went after Jose the gardener and Maria the maid.

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Quickly, with encouragement by Supreme Court Justice Brett “Beer Bong” Kavanaugh, the system turned into a mass arrest and deportation program for people with brown and black skin rather than genuine “bad guys.”

This was the first point where Democrats began to publicly back away from the policy as white supremacist Republicans and racist independents embraced it more vigorously.

Then came the second policy turn, taking Trump, Vance, and Miller the next step toward their ultimate goal of turning America into a modern police state. In March 2025 during Trump’s second term, ICE agents began to mask up to conceal their identities and started using explicit and deadly violence against not only people of color suspected of being undocumented immigrants but also against anyone demonstrating against Trump and his ICE.

In the sixteen months since, ICE officers have shot at least 30 people, killing at least 8 that we know about, and as of last month at least another 50 people have died in ICE custody. There have been no meaningful investigation of any of them and no prosecutions of ICE officers whatsoever for these “routine” actions.

And routine is exactly what they’ve become.

Which brings us to the next step, their third turn in the road: arresting and imprisoning legal immigrants for their words rather than their actions.

The Guardian reported yesterday that Salah Sarsour, the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, a green-card-holding business-owning legal permanent resident of the United States for over 30 years with six US citizen children and nine citizen grandchildren, was arrested by ICE and held in a brutal detention center for 80 days where he lost 30 pounds and was denied monitoring for his diabetes:

“On 30 March, he was on his way to see his elderly mother when he was surrounded, he said, by at least 10 unmarked vehicles and armed agents in civilian clothing and whisked away, first to a detention center near Chicago and later miles away at a facility in Indiana. …

“When Sarsour, who has no criminal record in the US, was first detained, he thought the agents had mistaken him for someone else. When they tried to get him to sign paperwork agreeing to being deported, he refused.

“‘I was very confused,’ he said. Only as his ordeal protracted into days did he realize he had been targeted for his activism. ‘That really shocked me, to be honest,’ he said.”

Sarsour was only released because US district judge James Patrick Hanlon concluded he’d been held because of his outspoken support of Palestinian rights and not because of any crime he’d committed, immigration status or otherwise. He faces another court proceeding today in Chicago that may result in his being fully freed or re-imprisoned.

But now Trump’s concentration camps have officially been used to hold people whose views the administration dislikes.

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Trump’s September 25th National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

It was used last month to indict 15 protestors in Minneapolis. And now Secretary of State Marco Rubio has essentially declared that it’s a loaded gun pointed at anybody who opposes Trump or is even a progressive member of the Democratic Party. The excuse/weapon they’re apparently planning to use is Cuba.

For Rubio, it’s a two-fer. He wants to run for president and thinks taking Cuba will get him there…but needs an excuse. And that excuse will also provide Trump, Vance, Miller, et al with a fine opportunity to start rounding up American progressives.

Labeling Cuba as “The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” Rubio issued a 140-page document which claims that that poverty-stricken island nation:

“…has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

He claimed, to an audience including representatives from 66 countries and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon:

“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa.

“Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The document names American citizens, just as the new White House website is now naming individual American reporters, who are essentially accused of being communist/“leftist” collaborators.

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They include my colleagues David Pakman and Amy Goodman, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, influencer Hasan Piker, and nineteen others, including two other members of Congress.

The 20 organizations named include the Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, the National Lawyer’s Guild, and “Antifa.”

So now the architecture is in place. ICE has billions to expand their concentration camps, they’ve spread their secret police across every corner of America, they’re tied into Flock cameras and Palantir’s databases on pretty much every American citizen, and they’ve demonstrated they’re invulnerable to local law enforcement and can abuse or even kill people who resist them at will.

And now the Trump regime, like Putin and Hitler before them (among dozens of others), have identified “the enemy within” who must be purged and separated from society.

It might be good time to reach out to our elected officials and demand action. The phone number for Congress is 202-224-3121 but don’t forget your local officials, too, as it appears they’ll soon be dealing with ICE or ICE-affiliated federal goons coming for the “domestic terrorists” who defy “traditional American views.”

Louise’s Daily Song: “First They Came For”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from.

Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from.

The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028.

Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.

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Around that same stretch the CDC quietly cut its own foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens down to two, and cyclospora was one of the six it stopped watching. The monitoring had always been a hassle for the giant salad makers. And then the big money hit Trump’s bank account, and you’re the one stuck in the bathroom wondering who’s payoff got you.

That’s the whole corrupt Republican machine in a single lettuce field, and what follows is the same story told a couple dozen more times.

Americans would like to breathe air that isn’t giving their kids asthma and shortening everybody’s lives. The fossil fuel industry has hated the government’s clean air authority for decades. And then, after oil executives were asked for a billion dollars at a Mar-a-Lago dinner and the industry poured at least $75 million into electing Trump, his EPA moved to repeal the “endangerment finding,” the legal foundation underneath every clean air rule we’ve got. The money hit the GOP’s account, and the rules that keep the air breathable started disappearing.

You’d like the option of a clean, cheap electric car that never has to visit a gas station, the kind of thing that saves you money at the pump and doesn’t cook the planet your grandchildren have to live on. Detroit’s old guard and the oil patch preferred you keep buying gasoline forever. And then the same oil money that bought the air rules bought the car rules too, and the tax credits that made electric vehicles affordable, along with the tailpipe standards that were finally cleaning up our cities, were thrown straight into the shredder by the GOP.

Most of us would like to drink a glass of tap water without wondering about the forever chemicals that now even show up in the blood of newborn babies. And then the chemical industry hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal limits ever set on those PFAS compounds got weakened and pushed off into the distance before most people had even heard they existed.

Anybody who’s stood at a pharmacy counter would like their medicine to cost what it costs in every other wealthy country instead of three or four times as much. The drug industry spends more money lobbying Washington than any other business on Earth. And then all that money hit the GOP’s accounts, and the price relief that was finally within reach kept getting whittled down toward nothing.

Working families would like health coverage they can afford and actually keep. And then the money landed in the GOP’s money bin, the big beautiful bill took an axe to Medicaid, the subsidies that made marketplace insurance affordable were allowed to lapse, and millions of people who did absolutely nothing wrong lost their doctor.

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We’d all like the government to keep funding the research that cures cancers and catches the next pandemic before it becomes one. And then the checks to Republican politicians from billionaires who don’t want to pay their damn taxes cleared, the National Institutes of Health got gutted right alongside the disease trackers at the CDC.

Anybody with an aging parent would like to know the nursing home has enough staff on the floor to answer the call button before dawn. And then the private equity firms that have been gobbling up elder care hit the GOP’s bank account, and the first federal minimum staffing rule for nursing homes, the one that would have guaranteed a real nurse was actually in the building, got killed.

The people who cut and pack our meat would like to keep all ten of their fingers, and their children would like to stay out of the slaughterhouse. And then the giant meat packers wrote their checks to Republicans, the line speeds got cranked up faster, and the worker protections that were already threadbare got thinner still.

After a train hauling toxic chemicals derailed and poisoned East Palestine, Ohio, the folks in every town along the tracks would like the trains rolling through to be a little bit safer. And then the railroad lobby hit the GOP’s bank account, the bipartisan rail safety bill that came straight out of that disaster died quietly in Congress, and the industry went right back to running ever longer trains with ever fewer inspectors.

A person working full time would like to earn enough to cover the rent. And then the restaurant and retail lobbies hit the GOP’s checking account, and the federal minimum wage sat frozen at $7.25 an hour, exactly where it’s been since 2009, worth a little less with every year that passes.

Workers would like a fair shot at forming a union without getting fired for trying. And then the big corporate money poured into the GOP’s money bin, the National Labor Relations Board was stripped of the members it needs to so much as hold a vote, and the one referee working people had — the NLRB — was pulled off the field.

Young people would like an education that doesn’t come with a mortgage-sized debt hanging over them for the next thirty years. And then the for-profit college operators and the loan servicing big New York banks threw money at the GOP, the student debt relief got strangled in the courts, and the rules meant to stop predatory diploma mills got loosened all over again.

Regular taxpayers would like the morbidly rich to chip in something close to their fair share. But then the billionaires hit both Trump’s and the GOP’s bank accounts at once, the giant tax bill tilted even harder toward the top, and the IRS enforcement money that was finally going to audit the yacht and private jet crowd got stripped right back out, so they can go on not paying.

People who paid into Social Security their entire working lives would like it to be there, with the phone answered by an actual human being, when they finally retire. And then the big banks’ money landed in Republican campaigns, the Social Security Administration got hollowed out, field offices and phone lines went dark, and the same crowd that swears it’s protecting the program made it harder to reach someone at SSA than it’s been in generations.

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A young person with a good idea would like to start a small, local business without a trillion dollar monopoly crushing them like a bug. And then the biggest corporations on Earth lined up to fund Trump’s inauguration, his new ballroom, and his library, and the antitrust cops who might have protected the little guy suddenly discovered they had somewhere else to be.

Ordinary investors would like a financial cop on the beat to guard against the next Ponzi scheme and the next collapse that wipes out their savings. And then the crypto industry assembled a war chest north of $193 million and became the single biggest corporate spender for Republicans in our elections as it made billions for Trump and his boys, and the SEC promptly dropped its fraud cases against Coinbase and Ripple while the GOP-controlled Congress rushed the industry’s own wish list into law.

You’d like some say over whether artificial intelligence takes your job, tracks your every move, and answers to nobody at all. And then the tech billionaires launched a hundred million dollar super PAC aimed at erasing the AI safety laws that thirty eight states had already passed, and Republicans in Washington got to work writing exactly the rules Silicon Valley ordered up.

We’d like our national forests and Arctic refuges to still be standing for our grandchildren. And then ConocoPhillips handed a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration and got expanded drilling in Alaska for its trouble, and the public land that’s supposed to belong to all of us got auctioned off to whoever could cover the entrance fee.

Parents would like every kid, not just the wealthy ones, to have a good public school right down the street. And then the voucher and privatization money hit the GOP’s account, the Education Department got gutted, and public dollars started flowing to private and religious schools that answer to no one.

Americans once had a public broadcasting system and a genuine range of voices on the radio dial. And then the rightwing billionaire’s money landed in GOP pockets, Congress clawed back the funding for PBS and NPR, and the handful of billionaires who already own most of the rest of the media got a little less competition from the stations that were actually free.

This is supposed to be a country where the government doesn’t get to pick your religion for you. And then the hard-right so-called “Christian” dark money network that spent years quietly buying the federal courts hit its stride, and now the Ten Commandments are being ordered onto the walls of public school classrooms and somebody else’s faith is getting written into your children’s curriculum.

Women would like to make their own decisions about their own bodies, right down to whether and when to build a family through something like IVF. And then the same small circle of rightwing misogynist billionaires who bought the six Republicans on the Supreme Court got the ruling they’d paid for, and a right that had stood for half a century was simply gone.

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Every American would like a fair shot in business and in the military based on what they can actually do, not on who they happen to know or the color of their skin. And then the white supremacist billionaire bigots’ money hit the GOP’s account, “diversity” got turned into a slur, and the programs that had pried open doors for people long locked out of them got purged from one end of the government to the other.

Underneath every last one of these sits a single machine. Americans would like their policies decided by voters, by actual human beings casting actual ballots, and not by whoever writes the fattest check.

And then, back in 2010, Clarence Thomas cast a deciding vote in Citizens United, the ruling that let unlimited corporate cash flood our politics, and the family of the Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire who’d been quietly showering him with luxury vacations for years went and increased their own political giving by 862 percent.

That money didn’t just hit one bank account. It bought the very door through which all the rest of it walked.

Every item on this list was a choice various Republicans made in exchange for money.

None of it was weather or fate or the natural order of things falling into place. Each time, a big majority of Americans wanted the better outcome, and each time a very small number of enormously wealthy people wanted the worse one, and each time the wealthy won, because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court turned dollars into speech and corporations into people.

The saving grace is that a check still isn’t a vote, at least not yet, and there are a great many more of us than there are of them.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump Delivers”

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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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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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When you go to see Christopher Nolan’s new epic film The Odyssey (as Louise and I did on Saturday), you’ll be bathed in the revelation that Trump and his military lickspittles are breaking the most ancient law that created what we today call western civilization.

The movie even explains Iran’s rageful response to Trump’s violations of “Zeus’ Law” and tells us of the possible consequences of his illegal and morally criminal attack on that country (which had not attacked us first) as his war of choice plays out.

First, a tiny bit of backstory:

Theoxenia isn’t a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s at the core of both ancient Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Iranian religions (among others) and traditions and The Odyssey. It means that there are gods wandering the Earth disguised as humans, and therefore we have an obligation to treat others — particularly strangers or people we don’t know or understand — as we would want to be treated, ourselves. With compassion, honor, and generosity.

In the movie, it’s referred to as Zeus’ Law, and its violation is the thread that runs through the entire three hours. It honors Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, guests, and suppliants. In the Greek religion of that day, hospitality wasn’t mere courtesy but a sacred obligation, and Zeus himself stood behind it as both guarantor and avenger. Any stranger at your door came under his protection, so to mistreat a guest was to offend the king of the gods directly.

The Odyssey is built around this idea of xenia from end to end: you can read the whole poem as a ledger of good and bad hosts. The Phaeacians who bathe and feast the shipwrecked Odysseus without even knowing his name first are the ideal, while the suitors devouring his household in his absence are the great domestic violators, and their slaughter at the end reads as xenia enforced with a sword. The Cyclops Polyphemus is the ultimate anti-host, a creature who eats his guests and openly scorns the gods, which is why his punishment feels like cosmic justice rather than mere revenge.

Theoxenia also appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Iranian pre- and post-Islamic traditions.

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Most people who’ve been through Bible School as kids remember how, in Genesis 18, Abraham sees three strangers approaching his tent in the heat of the day and rushes out to meet them, washing their feet, slaughtering a calf, and setting out a feast before he has any idea who they are. Only later in the encounter does it become clear they’re divine messengers, and one delivers the promise that Sarah will bear a son.

The very next chapter gives us the dark mirror image of that generation’s Trump-like behavior: the men of Sodom, who greet the same visitors with violence rather than welcome. In the Jewish tradition this pairing became foundational to hachnasat orchim, the welcoming of guests, and it’s why later rabbinic thought treats Sodom’s real sin as cruelty to strangers. The lesson drawn by these twin stories is that when you open your door to the stranger, you may be receiving God unawares.

When Jesus tells his followers in Matthew 25 that whatever they did for the least of these — the hungry, the stranger, the naked/homeless, the imprisoned — they did for him, he’s standing squarely inside that Abrahamic story, where the guest carries a hidden divine presence. His parable of the Good Samaritan works the same theme, making the despised outsider the only one who actually fulfills Zeus’ Law. And Paul’s letter to the Hebrews makes the connection explicit when he urges believers not to neglect hospitality to strangers, “for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it,” a direct reference to Abraham’s three visitors.

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And it’s also intrinsic to both ancient and modern-day Iranian hospitality traditions. The ancient Persian counterpart to Zeus Xenios is Mithra, the Zoroastrian yazata or divine being whose entire jurisdiction is the law that strangers must be treated well because they could be divine beings in disguise. In living Iranian culture it’s known as mehman-navazi, which literally means “guest-cherishing” the deep-rooted tradition of treating guests with extraordinary honor, expressed in the elaborate ritual courtesy of ta’arof:

مهمان حبیب خداست. Mehman habib-e khodast. The guest is the beloved of God.

When Iranians first met with Kushner and Witkoff and then went to a February 28th meeting in Tehran to discuss the details of the deal offered, the compound where the meeting was taking place was bombed by the US and Israel, killing Ayatollah Khamenei, most of his family, and around 40 senior officials.

This was viewed by many in the region as a basic violation of Zeus’ Law. While the meeting with the strangers took place in Geneva, Switzerland, their offer was brought — like the Trojan Horse — into the home of the Supreme Leader himself and arguably led straight to his slaughter.

On the Muslim street there was real popular fury at this violation, most sharply in Pakistan, where protesters tried to storm the US consulate in Karachi and at least nine people were killed, and in Iraq, as well as with rallies and vigils elsewhere.

Iranian MP Amirhossein Sabeti was explicit about the now-clear danger of continuing to have good-faith negotiations with Witkoff and Kushner:

“Didn’t war happen in the middle of negotiations before? So you want to negotiate again so war happens and our new leader gets assassinated too?”

Last week, veteran reporters Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill shared a shocking allegation they say was presented directly to them by Iranian officials: that the Iranians had informed VP Vance that Kushner and Witkoff, instead of negotiating in good faith, were simply moving the negotiations along in fits and starts that would send the price of oil up and down, all while betting on oil futures.

The reporters laid it out on their Drop Site News Substack newsletter:

“In June, Iran calculated profits from such alleged manipulation had reached $9 billion and formally requested, in writing, that Iran should share in the proceeds.

“‘We have conveyed through intermediaries that $4.5 billion of this sum should also be allocated to the Iranian side,’ the Iranian official said. ‘The exchanged texts will ultimately become part of the historical record.’”

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Odysseus paid for his reluctant role in the pillage and rape of Troy — and his coming up with the betrayal idea of the Trojan Horse — by being punished by the gods for twenty years, ten of them a god-cursed wandering through storms, monsters, and the loss of his men.

And that event is often cited as the pivot point when the ancient world turned from centuries of civilization to centuries of barbarism and democracy was lost for millennia.

The sack of Troy was not merely a victory but a desecration, a night when the Greeks butchered old King Priam at his own household altar, hurled the infant Astyanax from the city walls, and dragged Cassandra screaming from the temple of Athena, violating in a single evening every sacred bond the gods guarded: the suppliant’s safety, the altar’s sanctuary, the guest-friendship that had bound even enemies.

The Trojan Horse itself was the perfect emblem of that turn, because it weaponized trust, taking the oldest rule of the ancient world — that a gift offered and accepted creates a sacred obligation — and rigging it as a trap.

And the gods answered in kind, scattering the victors across the wine-dark sea so that the men who’d trampled the laws of heaven learned, one drowned crew and one ruined homecoming at a time, that a civilization that wins by betraying its own sacred order will not survive the winning.

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And, of course, with Trump it’s not just Iran. His betrayals of trust and tradition include Greenland, Cuba, Ukraine, NATO, Venezuela, Canada, and our own citizens. He even betrayed every one of his three wives, and now he is betraying our Constitution.

One wonders how long America — and worldwide democracy itself, along with the civilized rules and respect for law it requires — will similarly pay for Trump’s and Netanyahu’s analogous violations of Zeus’ Law.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump and the Odyssey”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops.

He’ll point back to last night‘s speech and tell the nation:

“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”

He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”

He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.

And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.

This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.

As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW last night:

“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”

Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?

He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.

The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.

This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.

Many of them sat in the room with him last night, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.

Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.

After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.

He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.

This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.

He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.

This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.

It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Leticia James to Adam Shiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.

He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued the day before yesterday.

But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.

That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.

Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.

My friends who were there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.

That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.

Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.

Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.

— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.

— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.

— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.

— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.

— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.

People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.

That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”

What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.

Go be somebody who’s watching.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Now We Know (the Road to Emergency Rule)”

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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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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Tonight at 9 p.m., Donald Trump will commandeer prime-time television for what he’s billing as a speech about “free and fair elections,” promising “really big news” and reportedly planning to unveil what his people describe as “newly declassified intelligence” about “foreign (Chinese Communist Party) interference” in the 2020 election.

Two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a podium and told America why the Pentagon needs an extra $350 billion:

“We’re fighting communism on our own shores.”

He followed that up on social media with, “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!”

The communists and barbarians, in case you’re wondering, are you and your neighbors, and the proof is how we voted in Democratic primaries this spring.

Just the idea of returning to the McCarthy era of redbaiting like Johnson is doing here is obscene.

Every day now brings another story like these, and every one of them gets reported as if it was just a new, fresh outrage, each completely disconnected from yesterday’s new, fresh outrage.

But these steps Trump and his lickspittles are taking aren’t even remotely random. They’re part of a classic dictator’s checklist, and we know exactly what the checklist looks like because Vladimir Putin already worked through it, step-by-step, between 2000 and 2012, converting a struggling democracy into the police state that Russia is today. And he wasn’t the first; this goes from the days of Machiavelli through 20th century Europe to here, now.

Putin’s first move was the media. In 2001, masked “tax police” raided NTV, Russia’s last independent television network, and handed it to a state-controlled company; within a few years every national network answered to the Kremlin.

Here, Trump began by suing the networks for “defamation” (just like Putin did). Next, the FCC became a weapon aimed at broadcasters, the president slanders reporters from news organizations he dislikes, and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon imposed press restrictions so severe that dozens of reporters turned in their credentials rather than sign away their independence, all while media consolidation shrinks the number of independent newsrooms every year. Trump’s loyal toady at the FCC is trying to blow up the 39% of ownership rule so a billionaire nepo-baby Trump ally can take over CNN along with CBS and dozens of other media outlets.

Putin’s second move was the oligarchs. In 2003 he arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, and the message was instantly understood: wealth in Russia would henceforth serve the Kremlin or be confiscated by it. Loyal oligarchs got massively richer as I pointed out last Friday; disloyal ones got prison or exile. Here it’s more subtle, but the message is the same.

Senate and House Democrats are now formally investigating whether Trump’s pardons operate as a pay-to-play scheme, and the roster of the pardoned reads like a donor list: Forbes documented a $3.5 million contribution to Trump’s super PAC followed by a pardon for the donor’s father, and a pardon for Binance’s founder after his company steered literally billions of dollars through the Trump family’s crypto venture.

Crypto policy, fossil fuel policy, chip exports to foreign governments bearing gifts: it’s all for sale, and the morbidly rich are paying off Trump and the GOP to expand their fortunes.

Third came the security forces. Putin spent years building police and paramilitary units loyal to him personally rather than to Russian law; then in 2016 he created Rosgvardia, a national praetorian guard of some 340,000 troops answering directly to the president to “fight terrorism” and track down “illegal immigrants” within Russia.

Here, the Pentagon has ordered every state to stand up “quick reaction forces” totaling roughly 23,500 National Guard troops trained in batons, body shields, stun guns, and pepper spray, ready to deploy to American streets within hours of a presidential “emergency” order.

ICE has also grown into exactly the kind of federal force Putin would recognize, holding a record 70,766 people in a nationwide network of more than 200 “detention facilities,” with the American Immigration Council reporting that the administration’s stated goal was at least 100,000 detainees. Nearly all of this year’s detention growth has come from people with no criminal charges or convictions at all.

Seventy thousand human beings are now warehoused without meaningful due process in violation of the 4th through 8th Amendments, with billions being spent right now to expand that capacity for tens of thousands more. There’s a word for camps like that: history will use it even if today’s newspapers won’t.

Fourth, Putin criminalized the opposition. His “foreign agent” and “extremism” laws turned political dissent itself into a “security threat,” so that by the end even holding a blank sign in a public square got you beaten, arrested, or shot.

Here we have NSPM-7, the national security directive that treats progressive political activity as an “indicator of terrorism” (I’ve covered it in detail here). Trump spent his America 250 speech at Mount Rushmore calling on the nation to “vanquish communism from our shores,” and just this week he’s demanded that democratic socialism be “criminalized” and its elected leaders “deported.”

Like Putin did with the Duma (the Russian parliament) that threat includes sitting members of Congress, as well as the mayor of New York City and millions of American voters, all now reclassified by Trump and the GOP as an “enemy” to be imprisoned or removed from the country.

People brush it all off, saying Trump’s “merely being hyperbolic”; he’s not. He’s serious, just like Putin was and Hitler was before him when he ran the exact same playbook.

Then came the courts, the history books, and the public square. Putin perfected what Russians bitterly call “Basmanny justice,” courts that reliably rule for the Kremlin.

Our Supreme Court’s Republican majority now routinely uses the so-called “shadow docket” — a procedure invented for actual time-sensitive government emergencies — to hand Trump, oligarchs, and the GOP wins without briefing, argument, or explanation, while expanding the flow of dark money that keeps Republican and (too many Democratic) politicians in fear of or in debt to “donors” who fund elections and give them what the Republicans on the Supreme Court now call “gratuities.”

Putin then imposed unified patriotic history textbooks; here in America we’re watching schools, universities, and libraries being bullied into teaching a white Christian nationalist version of American history while the America 250 celebration was converted into explicitly partisan pageantry, complete with banners of Trump’s face draped across federal buildings in Washington the way Stalin’s once papered Moscow.

And Putin fenced off the squares. This month the Secret Service, the Interior Department, and the White House released a plan for permanent fencing around Lafayette Park, the most storied protest ground in America. The official rationale is security after assassination attempts, but when you read the plan’s own language you see that it identifies the park as a “focal point” for demonstrations and promises that a permanent, properly anchored fence “would assist in de-escalating most potentially violent protest.”

In plain English, they’re walling off the place where Americans have gathered to petition their presidents since Jefferson’s day, over the objections of members of Congress, sixteen weeks before a midterm election.

And finally, there’s the foreign policy aspect of it all, because aspiring autocrats always have each other’s backs.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a campaign to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court (which has indicted Putin and Netanyahu) “brick by brick,” pledging a “whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the one tribunal on Earth that could someday prosecute the war crimes this administration keeps getting away with.

Then the State Department posted grant applications offering millions of dollars to European groups that share the administration’s “political philosophy” on “migration, sovereignty, and Western civilizational heritage,” aka rightwing white male Christian supremacy, presumably complete with Nazi salutes.

So now our United States government is funding far-right movements inside allied democracies to pull them toward authoritarianism, precisely the operation Putin’s Internet Research Agency has run against us since the 2016 election, but now reported by the Financial Times as official American policy against other democracies.

Meanwhile Trump and Putin have spoken by phone fourteen times (that we know about) since Trump returned to office, most recently an 85-minute conversation on the Fourth of July, three weeks after the previous call, with another already scheduled. During that Independence Day call, Putin took the occasion to remind Trump of “Russia’s contribution to the formation of American statehood.” He’s enjoying his new role of mentor to the guy running our country.

I spent decades doing international relief work in countries run by despots and what struck me then, and haunts me now, is how little the formula varies from one country to the next. The details change with the language and the flag, but the architecture stays the same:

I’ve worked in at least a dozen countries where every one of those boxes was checked, and the air feels different there. People lower their voices in restaurants. They glance around before they finish a sentence.

Which brings us to the one box Putin checked that Trump hasn’t yet, but it appears tonight’s address will be all about.

Many Americans don’t realize that Putin never abolished Russian elections. Russians still line up and vote in every cycle. He simply made the elections incapable of removing him: opponents disqualified or imprisoned or poisoned, ballot access controlled, observers expelled, the Russian equivalent of extreme gerrymandering, and vote counting supervised by loyalists.

His ideologist Vladislav Surkov dressed it up as “sovereign democracy.” And Putin’s method for capturing the machinery was always the same: manufacture or exploit an emergency, then present the seizure of the election as the remedy.

After the Beslan school massacre in 2004 — his first major effort — he used the nation’s grief to abolish the election of Russia’s governors entirely and appoint them himself. From there it was a straight line through oligarchy to dictatorship, as has happened so often in other countries throughout history.

Now look at what is predicted by insiders for tonight.

A primetime address about “free and fair elections,” built around supposedly declassified intelligence of foreign interference, delivered by a president who spent Monday claiming fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral primary and who has spent months demanding tighter federal control over how Americans vote in November.

All this while his House Speaker declares that this fall’s ballot question isn’t affordability, inflation, or wages but communism versus the republic. His administration games out ICE at polling places, put in new mail ballot restrictions through the Post Office, and will tonight provide their excuse for creating the machinery to challenge results they don’t like (when they can swing an election).

Emergency first, “reform” second. It’s Putin’s Beslan strategy almost to the last detail.

Have we gone so far down the road to fascism/Putinism that it’ll work? There are some concerning indicators, including what people at the highest levels of our government and within the most hallowed halls of American power have simply told us straight out.

In September 2022, the broadcast networks refused to air President Joe Biden’s Independence Hall speech about “threats to American democracy,” deeming it too “political”; one ran a game show and reruns instead.

That night, after receiving official, top-secret security briefings from American intelligence agencies that so alarmed him that he felt he had to alert the public, then-President Biden said, in part:

(The entire text is pasted below the end of this article)

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. …

“But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.

“These are hard things. …

“And here, in my view, is what is true: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.

“They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.

“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.

“They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.

“They look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.

“And they see their MAGA failure to stop a peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election as preparation for the [next] elections.

“They tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.”

It’s not like we weren’t warned. By the president of the United States, for G-d’s sake. And none of the corporate press said pretty much a single word about his speech or the networks’ refusal to carry it.

And none bothered to mention Biden’s warning when it was fulfilled this year as Donald Trump set about systematically firing tens of thousands of people from the Justice Department and its investigative and law enforcement divisions, and attempted to put the FBI Director in prison.

Last December, however, all four networks cleared their primetime schedules, interrupting the Survivor finale, for a nakedly partisan Trump address.

As of this moment, Poynter reports, the networks say they haven’t decided about tonight. AOC, among others, is explicitly calling on the networks to refuse to carry his address this time.

Watch what they do. Networks whose parent companies face federal investigations and merger reviews have a way of discovering the newsworthiness of whatever the man controlling those reviews wants them to say about him and his message.

Putin never had to nationalize every channel; after NTV, the rest fell into line on their own.

In every country I worked in where the formula succeeded, however, it succeeded because it was completed before enough people recognized the pattern, and America hasn’t yet reached that point.

Just listen to AOC or Sheldon Whitehouse or Bernie, among others; most real Democrats have already or are just now figuring this all out.

The pattern is increasingly obvious, even if the media never reports this holistically. The last box is still unchecked, and the machinery for protecting the vote still exists: courts that haven’t all capitulated, secretaries of state in both parties who take their oaths seriously, and most of all an electorate that just spent the spring primaries demonstrating it can turn out in numbers no one can quietly “manage.”

Putin’s system worked because most Russians didn’t see it coming and when it was finally there they (correctly) concluded that resistance was largely pointless. The single most dangerous thing Americans could do right now is reach that conclusion sixteen weeks early.

So listen carefully to what Trump says tonight and what Democrats and experts on fascism, Putin, and the future of America say in response.

We can discuss it all tomorrow on my radio/TV show and in the comments here and the comments to tomorrow’s Hartmann Report op-ed.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Authoritarian Playbook”

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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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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Here is the entire text of President Joe Biden’s speech which our networks refused to air:

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Tomorrow night at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.

An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.

To understand what we’ll actually be watching Thursday night, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.

Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.

So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit, the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.

He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.

Over their thirteen years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened.

When Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, Trump reportedly demanded of his aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was mourning a fixer who’d been dead for three decades.

It took him eight more years, but he’s finally found his Roy Cohn. He’s found several of them, in fact, and he’s installed them at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That’s the machinery humming behind Thursday’s speech. The acting Director of National Intelligence is now Bill Pulte, a nepo-baby real estate guy with no intelligence experience who referred Trump’s political enemies for criminal prosecution based on mortgage records he pulled from government databases, and who Democrats say was installed precisely to help Republicans rig the midterms.

A White House task force has been combing through thousands of pages of classified documents, timed to land in the middle of an election season. Federal agents have already raided the Fulton County elections office and carted off 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, something I covered here at the Hartmann Report earlier this year.

Steve Bannon has promised ICE agents at the polls come November, and Trump’s new Postmaster General has confirmed the Postal Service won’t deliver mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government. And Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for permanent DNI, faces his Senate confirmation hearing today, one day before the speech, having already auditioned for the job by echoing Trump’s phony claims about “election integrity” on CNBC.

Standing in front of Mount Rushmore on the third of July, Trump told the crowd that if Senate Republicans kill the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, with its proof-of-citizenship, driver’s license-must-match-birth certificate (that kicks off millions of married women), and photo ID requirements, then Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

He tried holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage to force the Senate’s hand, and now GOP leadership is trying to attach SAVE to the national security spending bill this week. Even Dan Abrams, hardly a flamethrower, opened his radio show this Monday by saying it’s time to admit the president of the United States is “trying to cheat” in the midterm elections.

One detail gives the whole con away: Tulsi Gabbard, before she resigned as DNI last month, commissioned a forensic analysis of voting machines seized in Puerto Rico. That analysis, Reuters reports, found security flaws but no evidence of hacking — none — and Gabbard’s own follow-up report recommending fixes has been sitting unreleased at the White House for months.

They went looking for proof of fraud, found none (but perhaps a way to hack machines in the future), buried the report that could have helped states harden their systems before November, and are now preparing a primetime address built on the fumes of the very investigation that came up empty.

Roy Cohn would be proud. Claim victory no matter what the facts say. When you’re in the wrong and on the defensive, lie and attack.

I lived in East Germany’s shadow for a year in the 1980s, working for an international relief organization in a small village a few miles from the border, and in 1986 I passed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Most Americans probably don’t remember or even know that the DDR held elections; regular ones, with polling places and ballots and officially reported turnout levels that were typically north of 98 percent.

What they didn’t have was any possibility of a surprise. The regime had hollowed out every institution that could have made the outcome uncertain, so the election became theater, a ritual performed to legitimize a result already decided.

Putin ran East Germany’s KGB at the time, and he’s now Trump’s mentor with biweekly phone calls. Authoritarians rarely abolish elections. They keep the shell and kill what’s inside it, and it appears that Trump is following the path Putin blazed at multiple levels.

So will it work here? There’s no secret button that flips vote totals: more than 98 percent of American ballots are cast in jurisdictions with paper records, and when Trump signed an executive order that would have forced the decertification of voting machines, a federal judge permanently blocked it based on the Constitution handing the running of elections to the states.

The weapon Trump and his corrupt GOP will use is chaos, not hacking: seizures of ballots and equipment, decertification fights, litigation that delays counts past deadlines, ICE vans parked outside polling places in Democratic neighborhoods, and a pre-built national narrative, launched tomorrow night, that gives every Republican candidate permission to refuse to concede when they lose.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney, thinks the document dumps will fall flat with most Americans, and the primary results this spring suggest voters aren’t buying what Trump’s selling.

But Roy Cohn’s method never needed a majority to believe the lie. It only needed enough confusion, enough delay, and enough intimidation to change who shows up and what gets counted. It’s worked for Donald Trump for fifty years.

Remember, though, how it ended for the teacher. Roy Cohn died in 1986, disbarred just weeks earlier for dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation, abandoned by nearly everyone he’d ever helped, including Trump, who dumped him when he got sick.

The con, in other words, always works right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Whether Thursday night marks the beginning of the biggest con in American history or the beginning of its collapse depends less on what Trump says than on what tens of millions of us do between now and the first Tuesday this coming November.

Congress is voting this week on whether to bolt the SAVE Act onto the national security spending bill, so call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative where you stand, and don’t forget to mention Todd Blanche to your senators.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org, because purges are already underway in Red states, and track what your own legislature is doing to protect or restrict your ballot at openstates.org.

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark. As Jefferson told us, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty…”

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Con Always Works Right Up To The Moment It Doesn’t”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

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The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.

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Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.

Today, we’re there.

Why do you think Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin our country?

Louise’s Daily Song: “Why is Trump Tearing America Apart?”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes.

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had already introduced legislation to stop Trump, warning that we shouldn’t leave “citizens peering at their democracy from behind permanent fences.”

Lafayette Square is where Alice Paul and her Silent Sentinels stood through freezing winters demanding that Woodrow Wilson support women’s suffrage, and where peaceful protesters were gassed and beaten in June of 2020 so Donald Trump could stroll across the park for a photo op, Bible in hand.

For over two centuries, every president since John Adams has had to look out his window at Americans exercising their First Amendment right to tell him exactly what they think of him.

This administration proposes to end that tradition with steel pickets spaced four inches apart, and to have the whole apparatus ready as we head toward a November election that could break the GOP’s grip on Congress or see open corruption of our election by Trump’s goons, which would inevitably lead to mass protests.

Governments that trust their own people don’t wall themselves off from them; fortress states do.

And by a remarkable coincidence, this was the same week that one of the richest men in Russia gave the world a sixty-hour guided tour of life inside a mature fortress state, along with a warning about where that road ends that every American should know about.

The Economist just published an extraordinary profile of Andrey Melnichenko, whose fertilizer, coal, energy, and logistics empire accounts for roughly one full percent of Russia’s entire GDP, and who was the richest man in the country when Putin invaded Ukraine.

For twenty years Melnichenko lived the bargain Putin offered Russia’s oligarchs: stay out of politics and you can keep your fortune, your yacht, your villa in Switzerland. Then came the Ukraine war, the sanctions, and finally the shakedown.

In 2023, Putin’s prosecutors moved to confiscate one of Melnichenko’s Siberian power companies, and the case quietly evaporated two weeks later, right after he donated 32 billion rubles, about $335 million, to a school for gifted children that operates under Putin’s personal patronage.

In a fully realized oligarchy — like Putin has established in Russia and Trump is trying to create here with pardons and government contracts essentially for sale — that’s what legal property rights become: a subscription service, renewable at the pleasure of the man at the top.

Melnichenko told The Economist that he can see only four possible futures for Russia if it stays on the current course Putin is pursuing, every one of them grim:

— It can crawl back to a victorious West as a defeated vassal, which he predicts would provoke the same revanchist rage that the Versailles treaty incubated in Germany a century ago and that led straight to World War II.
— It can settle permanently into China’s orbit as a resource colony with a flag and faint appearance of independence.
— It can fragment into civil conflict, with warlords fighting over the pieces of a nuclear-armed state.
— Or it can finish its transformation into a continental North Korea, a garrison society sustained by rationing, repression, isolation, and what he describes as turning “external confrontation into a permanent instrument of domestic politics.”

That fourth scenario, which he says is under serious discussion inside the Kremlin, describes a government that identifies permanent enemies abroad and at home to justify permanent repression of its own citizens.

Anyone who’s watched masked federal agents disappearing people off American streets, or read this administration’s directives treating its domestic political opposition as a terrorist threat, or looked at the blueprints for that fence around Lafayette Square, has seen the early architecture of exactly that.

And Melnichenko’s preferred alternative for Russia against these four possibilities? He names it, with a candor you rarely hear from men of his class, as “oligarchy in the classical sense of the word.”

Rule by elites. Businessmen, technocrats, and nationalists would govern the country together, cutting deals among themselves because the four alternatives threaten their fortunes and their family dynasties, while ordinary Russians continue receiving what he frankly admits has so far been “a simulation of participation.”

Surprised that a billionaire’s best imaginable future for his nation is rule by billionaires?

Ours have been saying the same thing out loud for years about America. Peter Thiel, the money behind JD Vance’s entire political career, wrote for the Cato Institute back in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and he and many of his morbidly rich colleagues have spent the years since funding politicians and projects built explicitly to act on that conviction.

Melnichenko is a useful analyst for this critical time in both Russian and American history precisely because he’s no cartoon villain, and he’s barely ideological at all.

Ammonia from his plants ends up in Russian munitions, he coordinates with Putin’s military and secret police to protect his factories from Ukrainian drones, and he explicitly avoids “moral judgments” about things like democracy because he considers them a “distraction” from “designing systems that work.” Sort of like when Elon Musk said:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.“

Honoré de Balzac gets credit for the observation that, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” and Melnichenko’s own history, which began with an illegal currency exchange run out of a Moscow State University dorm room and protected by moonlighting police cadets, fits the pattern comfortably.

His way of thinking is common among men who’ve accumulated billions: they deal in what works, what maintains stability, what’s most efficient, and who can be bought or brought along, while “esoteric” and “idealistic” concepts like democracy, individual rights, and “the pursuit of happiness” only enter the calculation as variables to be managed.

That same mindset built America’s modern oligarchy. Exxon’s own scientists, for example, predicted global warming with alarming internal memos starting in the late 1970s, and the company’s executives, having weighed the future of our planet and our children against their bottom line, spent the next four decades funding lies to keep us burning their product and filling their money bins.

It was nothing personal: they were simply setting aside empathy while optimizing their own incomes, and the habitability of our planet was simply a variable.

The blueprint for the larger project was drafted in 1971, when tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, two months before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, sent a confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce calling on American business to organize, fund, and capture the universities, the media, the courts, and the American political system itself.

Out of that memo grew the think tanks, the “scholars for hire,” and the vast rightwing media machines that have spent five decades teaching Americans to distrust their own government, oligarchs arguing essentially that oligarchy is preferable to democracy.

Reagan’s functional suspension of our anti-monopoly laws in the 1980s then let a handful of men amass fortunes larger than any human beings had ever held, morbidly rich on a scale even the pharaohs never dreamed of, and today those men fund virtually every Republican in Congress along with a distressing number of Democrats.

Their wholly-owned toadies on the Supreme Court have spent the last half-century legalizing the purchase of the American government, a story I tell at length in my new book Who Killed the American Dream?

The foundation was a fraudulent headnote slipped into an 1886 Supreme Court decision falsely claiming the Court had ruled that corporations are persons with rights under the 14th Amendment; Citizens United built on that fraud in 2010 by declaring that corporate and billionaire money is constitutionally protected speech.

But it gets worse: in 2024 the Court’s six corrupt Republicans ruled in Snyder v. United States that officials who take payments after performing favors have merely accepted legal “gratuities” rather than bribes. Yeah, billionaires can now legally give tips to judges and politicians.

And just two weeks ago the same six on-the-take justices struck down the post-Watergate limits on coordinated party spending, freeing the morbidly rich to invisibly pour unlimited money through the parties directly into their chosen candidates’ campaigns, four months before the midterms. Justice Kagan warned in dissent that the RNC and DNC can now simply function as an oligarch’s or corporation’s secret checking account for their selected candidates and the public will never know who bought their election and owns their politicians.

Putin’s oligarchs and ours arrived by opposite roads: his through a state that swallowed its billionaires and ours through billionaires who swallowed their state, but the citizens of both countries ended up in the same place under either arrangement: on the outside, holding a “simulation of participation” while men like Musk buy our elections and the favors our politicians can bestow.

So Americans should ask the question Melnichenko asked about Russia: What futures are actually on our menu? I can count four, and the parallels are uncomfortable.

The first is aristocratic dictatorship. America completes its realignment away from the world’s democracies and toward Moscow, Beijing, and the Gulf monarchies that Trump and Vance so visibly admire, and the world gets run as a cartel of strongmen and sovereign wealth funds while our Constitution becomes a mere decoration. Much of our current foreign policy already points in this direction.

The second is civil conflict that tears our country apart. Prominent voices on the right have been openly fantasizing about civil war for years, and a government that expects to be loved doesn’t need a ten-foot fence around Lafayette Square or gates across Pennsylvania Avenue. Building permanent infrastructure to wall off protest four months before a national election shouts at us that Trump and Vance are planning for a coming confrontation with the American people.

The third is slow imperial decline, the road Britain walked after the two world wars: a once-dominant nation growing gradually poorer, shabbier, and more irrelevant while its aristocracy extracts whatever’s left. This is oligarchy’s default trajectory, the one we’re already on if nothing dramatic intervenes, and it ends with our grandchildren living in a country that used to matter but is now subject to the whims of its oligarchs and more powerful nations.

The fourth is democratic renewal, the road Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt opened and JFK and LBJ paved: breaking up concentrated wealth and power, taxing the morbidly rich, and building the healthcare, education, childcare, and retirement security that working people in Scandinavia and most of the rest of the developed world now take for granted.

Unlike the other three, this future has a living constituency and a vibrancy that’s been missing from the American political scene since the days of JFK.

Just three weeks ago, voters across New York swept young progressives and democratic socialists into Democratic nominations, toppling establishment incumbents despite millions in super PAC money arrayed against them, because ordinary Americans keep voting for economic democracy whenever somebody credible actually offers it.

Russia is probably too far down the road of tyranny to make a sudden transition like this back to democracy; its independent press is dead, its opposition leaders are in prison, in exile, or in the ground, and even its billionaire would-be reformer can’t imagine anything better than a politer class of elites running the place.

We’re not there yet. Our elections still mostly count, some of our courts still hold, our press is battered but breathing, and we still retain the right, for now, to stand in front of the White House and say, “No!” Every one of those things is on the ballot this November, and the people fencing off Lafayette Square understand that better than most.

Melnichenko offered one more observation that applies as much to Washington as to Moscow:

That’s true of dictatorships, and it’s equally true of oligarchies as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

Working people get angry when confronted with an exploitative rule by the rich and then rise up in revolt. We can see this happening in Argentina right this moment.

At that point, a nation’s leadership must choose between abandoning oligarchy and going back to democracy — as we did with Lincoln taking on the oligarchs of the Confederacy in 1861, and FDR’s New Deal presidency in 1933 — or bringing down the iron fist and converting the oligarchy into dictatorship, as Putin did in Russia.

Oligarchy, as I detail in that book, is always a transitional form of government that either reverts to democracy or transitions to dictatorship. It rarely last more than a single generation.

Thus, which kind of sudden change America experiences — the hard snap into strongman rule or the breaking of billionaire power over our government, purging dark money, and a restoration of democracy — will largely be decided by what we all do between now and the first Tuesday in November.

They’re building a fence around the town square, so our answer must be to make it useless by showing up everywhere they can’t fence. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand they block the permanent fencing of Lafayette Square and pass real protections for the November election.

Check your voter registration today at vote.org, because purges are already underway in multiple Red states, and save the Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, in your phone right now.

Democracy, as Bernie said on my program every Friday for 11 years, has never been a spectator sport, and this is the year that old cliché becomes literal. If this article helped you see the stakes, please share it widely and support independent journalism by subscribing at hartmannreport.com; the oligarchs own their media, and we have to sustain our own.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Oligarch’s Warning”

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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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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.

He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.

By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.

The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”

The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”

The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.

Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”

I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread.

I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)

My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work.

And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist.

Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in — to the shows and to the police — and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.

The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization.

Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.

There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.

So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:

— A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.

In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract.

Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.”

Federal agents physically blocked state investigators holding a valid judicial warrant from the scene of the Pretti shooting. Federal prosecutors who wanted to pursue the Good case as a civil rights matter were pressured until they resigned. Today, Good’s car sits shrink-wrapped and unexamined in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the state has been forced to sue the federal government just to learn the names of the agents who killed two of its citizens.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.

— A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.

On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years.

Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.”

And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment.

For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6th, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.

— A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.

Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover.

In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the Bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants.

The FBI has since retooled its roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their 4,000-plus personnel toward the American “left” and stood up a new Joint Mission Center that’s investigating the funding of anti-Trump protest movements and payment of bounties while actual crime fighting goes begging.

When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.

— A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.

In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis.

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice.

Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his seven-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway.

He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next.

That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.

— A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.

Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all fifty states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms.

Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval.

Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutzstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.

— A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.

Last month the Justice Department approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CNN, CBS News, HBO, and two major studios under David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby and a Trump ally who, the Wall Street Journal reported, privately assured administration officials he’d make “sweeping changes” at CNN if he got that network, too.

— A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects. As George Orwell wrote of fascism: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: the National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry.

In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there.

Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.”

That’s the same slogan under which 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers rallied at Madison Square Garden in 1939 beneath swastikas and a three-story portrait of George Washington, a chapter of our history this crowd would clearly prefer you never learn.

Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.

— And finally, a police state controls the vote.

In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents.

On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all fifty states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost eleven straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls.

Yesterday, citing last week’s Supreme Court decision giving him essentially unlimited firing power, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency that, along with the now-paralyzed Federal Election Commission, have the power to call out election fraud, illegal campaign tactics and spending, and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. Both are now effectively shut down.

And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.

So, are we in a police state yet?

Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question — or at least at the wrong moment — because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”

Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.”

Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview ten “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”

As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. … [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. …

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: every component is now built, tested, and humming.

But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.

That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.

So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections, demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls.

Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in Red states.

Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer.

Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it.

Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general.

And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize.

At least not yet.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Police State”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.

It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.

In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.”

And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.

One honest man took office swearing that he’d help ordinary people afford to live, and at that same moment, millions of working class people lost the ability to afford their insurance because Republican politicians consistently put their morbidly rich individual and corporate donors above all else.

Even Newsweek, no one’s idea of a radical rag, noticed the thing our media generally misses: the same cost-of-living fury that carried Donald Trump back into the White House in 2024 was the same fury Mamdani rode to City Hall a year later.

When Louise and I lived in a boat in a marina in Washington, DC back during the 2016 election year, we knew quite a few people retired from the Navy and Coast Guard who generally called themselves Republicans, but were split between Trump and Bernie for their vote. Why? Because both were promising real, meaningful change.

I’ve told you before about my dad. Carl came home from the Second World War, finally got a good union job in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, and on that one paycheck he raised us four boys, bought a house, put a new car in the driveway every couple of years, sent us toward college, took my mom on vacation, and retired with a pension that let the two of them travel the world.

That wasn’t wealth: that was the ordinary American middle class, and in 1981 — the year Reagan decided to destroy our unions, cut those “socialist benefits,” and freeze the minimum wage — two-thirds of us Americans lived in that middle class on a single income. Today it’s closer to only 40 percent of us, and it takes two full paychecks to reach what one paycheck used to buy.

Particularly over the past few years, America has politically bifurcated: One side is characterized by a guy in a red hat who’s dead certain that brown-skinned immigrants took his job and he wants them gone. The other is a young organizer knocking on doors for Medicare for All and tuition-free college.

Every cable network, every consultant, every party fundraiser will tell you these two are the opposite poles of our politics, the “far right” and the “far left” of our political spectrum. But in reality, they’re both looking at the same problem.

They’re both grieving the very same dead dream, reaching up for what my father had when I was a kid: a middle-class life. The difference is that one of them — the MAGA true believer — has been handed a Black/Hispanic/queer/female scapegoat while the other — the progressive — understands that we need to stop America’s oligarchs from their pillage.

But the financial pain underneath, the force driving both to want change, is largely identical, and it’s real.

The whole economic case Republicans made for mass deportation was that clearing out the immigrants would hand American workers a raise. It ignored the Republican destruction of the American union movement, and amplified the exploitable, often-nascent racism many in the GOP’s base already carried.

Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, put it plainly, insisting that illegal immigration had for years “artificially suppressed wages” and gutted the prospects of working-class Americans, especially young white men. That was the promise: a blue-collar wage boom, with a dose of cruelty to speed it up.

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Then the receipts came in.

A Brookings analysis found that ICE operations wiped out roughly 668,000 jobs, and that somewhere between 51,000 and 297,000 of those jobs had belonged to workers born right here in the United States. Construction, hospitality, and food service, the very industries where those anxious young men actually work, got hit the hardest.

University of Colorado economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox went looking for the promised windfall from Miller’s imprisonment and deportation campaign and couldn’t find it. There was no boost in jobs or wages for U.S.-born workers.

If anything, the crackdown hurt working-class men in immigrant-heavy trades like construction, because when you rip a non-citizen bricklayer off a job site you also idle the American electrician and project manager who needed that wall to go up.

So the red-hat guy’s pain is real. His paycheck really did shrink, his rent really is crushing him, his kid really can’t afford the college my dad could.

But the story he was sold about who did it to him is a lie, the same lie they sold his great grandfather in the 1920s when they swore it was Black people coming for his job, or his father in the 1980s when Limbaugh said it was the “Feminazis” who wanted to displace him, now just repackaged with browner faces, tradwives, fake Christianity, and a border.

The pain of being a working person in an America — where Republicans have all but destroyed the union movement and bipartisan neoliberalism has moved millions of jobs overseas — is genuine: but the villain is manufactured. And it’s manufactured by the same people quietly emptying working people’s wallets.

You can see the shared wound the moment you take the labels off and ask people about what actual policies they support instead of which political tribe they belong to.

The Century Foundation surveyed working-class Americans, including the ones who voted for Trump in droves, alongside their college-educated neighbors who lean Democratic. On the policies that actually shape their economic lives the two groups were highly aligned, both of them overwhelmingly backing populist economics and hard limits on billionaire and corporate power.

The rest of the polling tells the same story. A CNN survey this spring found 76 percent of Americans naming the cost of living as their single biggest economic problem, with about three-quarters saying the system is rigged for the powerful and three-quarters saying it’s harder to get ahead than it was a generation ago.

A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn’t a “left” or “right” number: that’s my dad’s vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.

Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others’ throats.

The irony is that while progressives have properly identified who killed the middle class (the title of my new book), Republican voters believe something entirely different, a story America’s oligarchs have spent literally billions to instill in them.

One rightwing story is that the enemy of the middle class are the Democratic politicians who Republicans are now calling communists: this very week, as I wrote yesterday, Trump is out branding Democrats as dangerous “communists” while democratic-socialist candidates keep winning primaries on Medicare for All, free college, and good union jobs.

And in a coarser corner of the rightwing world where racism is as much an animator (or more) than economic pain, the enemy Republicans are pushing are brown- or Black-skinned immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, eating your dogs and cats, and coming for your daughter and your job.

Both are aimed at the same exhausted, squeezed, frightened American who’s living in a rightwing bubble, trapped by Fox “News” as his information source or constantly spoon-fed rightwing outrage via the secret algorithms driving billionaire-owned social media.

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And as long as those Americans are glaring sideways at a “democratic socialist” or an immigrant, they aren’t looking at the American oligarchs who actually ran off with all their money.

Because somebody did run off with it. The RAND Corporation added up the damage and found that roughly 50 trillion dollars was quietly shifted from the bottom 90 percent of us to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018. Since then it’s up to around $80 trillion.

If wages had simply kept pace with what American workers produce, the typical worker today would be pulling in well over a hundred thousand dollars a year instead of around fifty, and the economic force driving racism and bigotry would be much weaker.

That money didn’t evaporate. It didn’t get taken by a busboy or a barista or a bricklayer. It was hauled off, in broad daylight, by the architects of forty-five years of Reaganism and neoliberalism, the ones who broke the unions, shipped the factories overseas, and turned healthcare and college loans into profit centers.

That’s who took my father’s single paycheck: not the woman picking our lettuce. Not the kid who just wants to see a doctor or get an education without going bankrupt.

The entire con depends on voters on the right never turning around and realizing they’re mourning the same identical loss that progressive Democrats are trying so hard to repair.

The instant working people stop asking “who’s the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do” and start asking “who took my dad’s paycheck,” the whole game is over.

That’s the one conversation the billionaires and their bought-off lickspittle politicians are truly terrified of.

So have it. Have it at the summer picnic with your MAGA brother-in-law and your progressive niece sitting side by side, and watch what happens when you skip the slogans and ask them both what kind of country they actually want to live in.

You’ll find (outside of the unrepentant and largely unreachable racists) that they want the very same America back, the one where an honest week’s work bought a decent life.

Then stop grieving it and start organizing to take it back, because it was never lost. As I lay out in Who Killed The American Dream?, it was stolen, and stolen things can be recovered.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Who Stole Our Future?”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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So, now Trump says we’re communists, you and me, after having earlier called us “potential domestic terrorists.”

“The Dumocrats, they are horrible. They want to resume the transgender mutilation of our children. They want to restart the war on Christians and churches. And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently -- they’re communists, they’re not social Democrats -- they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life. …

“You’ll live in squalor. There will be no food; there will be no housing; there will be no military; there will be no law and order; there will be no nothing. There will be no nothing. You’ll be a third world inhabitant in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. You’ll suffer or die, that’s what happens, for thousands of years because it’s been happening by different names. …

“The problem is, a couple of years go by, the whole place collapses, always does, always has. But I’m sorry to say, but assassinations of those who oppose them is a very important element of their ideology. Assassination is a big deal for them. They’re animals, they’re animals. ... They hate our country, they hate our people...”

He’s getting desperate, trying in an almost cartoonish fashion to revisit the “Red Scare” era of his first mentor, Roy Cohn (as I describe in detail in The Last American President), and Cohn’s boss Joe McCarthy. It’s also a variation on the strategy of his second mentor, Vladimir Putin.

Ironically, the main tenant of communism is that the government owns the businesses; Trump is the first American president outside of temporary wartime nationalization efforts who’s actually having the federal government take large stock positions in American companies.

So far, Trump has had the feds buy major ownership positions in Intel, USA Rare Earths, Vulcan Elements, MP Materials, Korea Zinc, Lithium Americas, xLight, ReElement Tech, Trilogy Metals, Westinghouse, Nvadia, AMD, and US Steel. And now he’s talking about our government taking parts of OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI companies.

This is a far cry from Barack Obama lending Elon Musk’s Tesla $465 million to keep him out of bankruptcy; having the government actually and permanently own meaningful parts of companies is about the closest you can get to the kind of communism we saw in the old USSR, China, and Cuba.

But the most astonishing part of the whole thing is how our mainstream media is treating Trump’s new red-baiting, taking on the role of stenographers rather than reporters. By and large, they’re letting this absurd charge stand as if it were actually credible, as Dan Froomkin has documented in detail in his excellent Substack Press Watch.

In reality, American communists are, frankly, a joke. I remember a few decades ago, the last time Republicans were calling Democrats communists, having the president of the US Communist Party on my radio show. I asked him how things were going and what his membership was, and he said, as I recall, words to the effect of:

“Things are going great. We’re up to almost 3000 members!”

The real threat to America today, Trump’s hysteria notwithstanding, isn’t communism: it’s the new American form of fascism that’s centered in the Trump regime, the Republicans on the Supreme Court, ICE, and is pushed heavily across the rightwing media empires that neofascist billionaires have set up over the past 40 years.

But he and the GOP consultants and the extremists who write his speeches seem to think they can make “communism” stick as the new label to apply to Democrats. And no doubt there are enough low-information voters out there that some will believe him when he spouts bullshit like Froomkin documents he did at the Faith and Freedom Christian nationalist conference:

“These are not social Democrats. These are hardcore, godless communists. They’re godless communists. All communists are godless. They don’t believe in God. This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion, 250 years ago. This is a major threat to our country.”

Apparently, the growing popularity of social democracy or democratic socialism — what in earlier versions FDR called the New Deal and LBJ labeled the Great Society — has the GOP and the oligarchs who own the party freaked out.

After all, these “left-wing” Democrats are pushing things that a solid majority of Americans have been telling pollsters they want ever since the days of Eisenhower: a national healthcare system, free college, quality public schools and local hospitals, unions and a livable minimum wage, and affordable housing, transportation, electricity, and groceries.

And those things would require demanding that the morbidly rich suddenly — after 45 years of the Reaganomics scam — start paying their damn taxes.

And the “democratic socialist” idea of taxing the rich to pay for the “General Welfare” — an obligation of our government specified in both the preamble and Article I of the Constitution — isn’t anything new or radical.

Long before anyone used the phrase, our nation’s Founders built the bones of what we’d today call democratic socialism.

In 1798 John Adams signed the Marine Hospital Act, which took 20 cents a month out of every sailor’s pay and was our country’s first federal payroll tax, and used it to build and run a network of government owned-and-run hospitals.

That wasn’t charity or a one-time bailout; it was a permanent, mandatory, federally operated healthcare system, the direct ancestor of today’s Public Health Service, and Thomas Jefferson was presiding over the Senate when this socialist program passed.

The next year Congress extended it to the Navy and added half-pay disability pensions for men hurt in the line of duty. That same founding generation federalized lighthouses and navigation aids in 1789, paid invalid pensions to Revolutionary War veterans, appropriated relief for refugees fleeing the Haitian revolution in 1794, and under James Madison set up a federal agency to get smallpox vaccine to ordinary people in 1813.

The men who wrote the Constitution didn’t treat the general welfare clause as a throwaway phrase; they taxed wealthy people, required participation, and spent public money to keep working Americans healthy, safe, and solvent, which is exactly the instinct today’s right sneers at as “socialism” and Trump is now calling “communism.”

But because Republicans have opposed anything that might help average people (and have to be paid for by the rich) since the days of Warren Harding, their tightfisted penury (except to subsidize the fossil fuel industry and the Epstein-billionaire class) isn’t generally popular when you ask people about specific policies.

So, instead, they have to invent a new hysteria every election cycle.

From Willie Horton to “Swift Boats,” from “death panels” to “death taxes,” from the War on Christmas to migrant caravans, Critical Race Theory, “groomers,” and transgender athletes, Republicans have spent the past four decades rolling out a succession of emotionally charged wedge issues and moral panics to shift public attention away from debates over healthcare, wages, taxes, labor rights, and other core policy issues.

So, Trump, Mike Johnson, and the whole bunch are now calling us communists, thinking they’ve finally hit on the strategy for 2026.

Oddly, about half of Americans literally aren’t old enough to remember the horrors of Stalin and Mao, and today’s Chinese communism seems to be working startling well (largely because it’s reinvented itself as state-managed capitalism). But since Reagan took a meataxe to our public education system, odds are most people under 50 haven’t even studied the actual difference between democratic socialism, state-run communism, and regulated capitalism.

So, will calling Democrats communists work for them this time the way smearing Democrats with race or gender has in the past?

Will the mainstream media ever get around to calling out this new McCarthyism for what it is?

Will Americans figure out it’s just another GOP diversion from their decades-long campaign to rob working people to the benefit of the morbidly rich?

I’m skeptical it’ll work, but the rightwing billionaire money doesn’t start pouring into this year’s election for another month or so: stay tuned…

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Red Scare is Back”

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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:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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My new book, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, is out today, and it plainly lays out why so much has gone wrong in this country since the Reagan Revolution and how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision came about.

The timing turns out to be almost eerie. Just this week, in a Common Dreams op-ed about California’s Proposition 40, Congressman Ro Khanna posed the question that has become both urgent and existential for America: Are we actually willing to tax billionaire oligarchs, or are we only willing to talk about it?

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once tried to warn us about this very moment, a warning which has echoes throughout history and in dozens of nations:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Prop 40 is really just the tiniest start, it we’re serious about rescuing both our middle class and our democracy. It would put a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of California’s roughly 200 billionaire oligarchs to keep hospitals open as Trump’s Medicaid cuts tear through the state, and the tech billionaires who’d have to pay it are using the power Citizens United gave them to pour tens of millions of dollars into killing it.

Khanna, who’s teamed up with Bernie Sanders on a national version of the same idea, is exactly right to ask.

But there’s a deeper question sitting underneath this: how did a few hundred people get so unimaginably rich, and so powerful, that taxing them at all now feels like a radical act?

How did we arrive at a place where a handful of morbidly rich billionaire oligarchs can spend more on a single ballot measure than working class families will earn in a dozen generations, just to avoid chipping in to save their neighbors’ emergency room?

The answer starts in 1886, with a fraud committed in broad daylight: the greatest political crime ever told, and it was pulled off by the oligarchs of that era.

On a cold winter afternoon in 2002, I was in the Vermont Supreme Court’s law library six blocks from my then-home in Montpelier, because I wanted to read the actual words of a Supreme Court decision that every law student in America was taught to revere.

The case is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and the textbooks all said in 2002 that it’s where the Court ruled that corporations are “persons” entitled to constitutional rights, particularly and specifically under the 14th Amendment.

I pulled down the heavy leather-bound 1889-published volume, found the case on page 394, and discovered something that changed how I understood this entire country: The Court never ruled any such thing!

The decision itself was about railroad fence posts and California property tax, and the justices explicitly wrote that they were not deciding the corporate personhood question at all.

The lie was in the headnote, the little summary written not by a justice but by the Court’s reporter, a former railroad man named J.C. Bancroft Davis, working hand in glove with a corrupt justice named Stephen Field and the railroad barons who supported Field and were the fabulously rich versions in that era of Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg, et al today.

One reporter, one sentence, one lie, and 140 years of consequences for both democracy and working people.

That single fraudulent sentence lay like an unexploded hand grenade just below our political infrastructure until, between 1978 and 1981, it became the foundation stone for the Reagan Revolution.

Corporate lawyers built an entire cathedral of “rights” on top of it, one amendment at a time, until they reached the logical endpoint in 2010, when five corrupt, on-the-take Republican justices handed down Citizens United and effectively legalized the buying and selling of our government, putting the oligarchs in charge and transforming our republic into — as Jimmy Carter told me on my radio program — an oligarchy.

The seventy-year legal war that corporations had lost over and over before 1886, and then “won” by this fraud, is the reason those California billionaires can treat democracy itself as something to be purchased at retail. Money became First Amendment protected “free speech,” corporations became “persons” with rights under the Bill of Rights, and a fat enough money bin became the power to reshape American politics.

For about fifty years the hand grenade was largely unexploded, because we still had the political will to hold corporate power in check. From Roosevelt through Carter we taxed great fortunes, legalized and then protected unions, regulated the powerful, and built the largest middle class the world had ever seen, the first in history to include more than half a nation.

Then came 1981. Reagan didn’t simply cut taxes and gut regulations. Following the playbook of the billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation, he reached back and pulled the pin on that 1886 hand grenade, turning corporate constitutional rights into a weapon aimed straight at everything the New Deal and Great Society had built.

The wreckage is measurable, and in the book I walk through it year by year.

In 1980, two-thirds of Americans were solidly middle class, and a single paycheck could buy a home, raise a family, cover college, and fund a dignified retirement. Today only about 40 percent of us are middle class, and it takes two full incomes to reach what one used to provide. If wages had simply kept pace with the productivity of American workers since Reagan took office, the typical worker today would be earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year instead of around fifty.

Measuring the result of this lie that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech,” the RAND Corporation calculated that roughly $50 trillion was quietly transferred from the bottom 90 percent of us to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018, every dollar of it out of working families’ pockets.

I still remember my dad coming home from the tool-and-die shop smelling of machine oil, talking at the dinner table about his Machinists Union and the pension that was going to let him and my mom travel the world someday. That was the ordinary promise of American life for about two-thirds of us back then, and corporate constitutional rights took it away from families like the one I grew up in.

Oligarchs from Reagan’s day to today, and the Republicans they own, realized that as working people watched that security disappear, their anger had to be directed away from the morbidly rich and their corruption of the Supreme Court, so they gave us what I call the “deflection playbook,” decade after decade of it.

“Welfare queens,” “illegal” immigrants, “takers” versus “makers,” trans people in sports, Willy Horton, Swift Boat veterans, one manufactured culture war after another (and today “communism!”) all of it engineered to keep working people furious at each other instead of at the very small number of corporations and their oligarchs quietly emptying our wallets.

Which brings us back to Ro Khanna’s question. Taxing billionaires, whether through California’s Prop 40 or the national wealth tax Khanna and Sanders have proposed, is necessary and long overdue, and I hope both succeed.

But as long as that 1886 lie and its offspring stand, every tax and every reform we manage to pass can be litigated into oblivion or simply bought back, the way Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote in Citizens United after years of lavish, undisclosed gifts from a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire with a stake in the outcome.

You can’t permanently tax a class of people who own the referees in Congress and the Supreme Court. That’s why the back half of my new book turns from the crime to the cure.

The real fix, the one that pulls the keystone out of the whole oligarchic arch, is a constitutional amendment declaring what the Founders always believed: that constitutional rights belong to human beings, not to artificial entities called corporations, and that spending money is not the same thing as free speech.

Move to Amend has already written the amendment, twenty-two states have already passed resolutions calling for it, and cities from Los Angeles to Boston have signed on.

Franklin Roosevelt gave us the vision for a new and progressive America back in 1944, when he proposed a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing every American a job, a home, healthcare, an education, and security in old age. We came within sight of that promise once, and it was sabotaged by Reagan, the GOP, and the oligarchs who owned them both.

We can get there again, but first we have to undo the crime.

So please read the book, pick up a copy today (it’s free in libraries), and — after you’ve read it — share it with someone who’s given up on politics because they can’t quite figure out what went wrong. Identifying the origin of the crime, after all, is the first step toward reversing it.

Look up the amendment movement, find out whether your state is one of the twenty-two, and if it isn’t, go help make it the twenty-third.

The morbidly rich spent decades and untold fortunes keeping this story buried, so the least the rest of us can do is tell it to everyone we know.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Who Killed the American Dream?”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is out today in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening.

A few weeks ago Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls.

“It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about thirty seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.”

Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.

I’ve heard variations on that story dozens of times in the past year, and apparently so have a lot of other people, because a piece making the rounds on Daily Kos a few weeks ago by the writer Vyan put words to something that’s been building in millions of American households since January of 2016.

The piece is bracing and worth reading in full, but the core observation is one that the right-wing media ecosystem genuinely can’t process: their voters are suddenly discovering that their daughters and sons and nieces and old college roommates no longer want to come to July 4th, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.

They’re treating this as some inexplicable “progressive cruelty,” as if the rest of us simply woke up one morning and decided to be petty.

Greg Gutfeld did a whole monologue on it on Fox “News.” The framing, of course, is that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to “look past” a single political choice your father or your uncle made:

“Can’t you just love them anyway? Why are you being so hateful?”

Here’s the thing they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require admitting what they actually did: they didn’t vote for lower egg prices, although that’s the cover story most of them have settled on by now.

They voted for a man who descended an escalator in 2015 and called brown-skinned Mexicans rapists, who described non-white immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians of fascism noted at the time was lifted almost verbatim from Mein Kampf.

They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.

They knew.

The Heritage Foundation published a 900-page blueprint to, in my words, “Make America White Again.” Miller did the interviews. JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” before he became his running mate, and then ran with him anyway, and the voters knew that, too.

So what they got is exactly the hate and racism they voted for, and now, seventeen months into the second Trump administration, more than 675,000 people have been deported, the ICE detention population has swelled to over 68,000 — a 70 percent increase over where it stood at the end of the Biden years — and people are dying inside those facilities at a rate this country has never seen before.

The Kaiser Family Foundation tracked 46 deaths in ICE custody between January 2025 and March 2026, with annual deaths roughly tripling from the eleven recorded in 2024 to thirty-three in 2025, and 2026 already on pace to exceed even that.

The ACLU now estimates someone is dying in immigration detention roughly every six days, and a CNN investigation a few weeks ago found that at least a dozen of those deaths were directly attributable to medical neglect, understaffing, and the cascading failures that happen when for-profit concentration camp operations double the detained population without doubling the doctors.

Three of the six deaths in a single recent month were suicides. The administration’s response has been to point out that the death rate, expressed as a percentage of the swollen detained population, comes to 0.009 percent, which is the sort of statistic you cite when you’ve already decided the people doing the dying aren’t quite people.

And Miller isn’t slowing down. He’s spoken openly about a vision of removing as many as 100 million people from the United States, a number that mathematically can’t just describe the undocumented, because there aren’t 100 million undocumented people in this country and there never have been.

That number describes naturalized citizens, mixed-status families, the U.S.-born children of immigrants, and anyone whose skin is dark enough that their presence Miller and his ideological allies consider an affront to what they keep calling “Heritage Americans,” aka “white people.”

Since the law changed in 1965 and we ended racial immigration quotas, the majority of immigrants to America have not been white, but white people (from South Africa, for G-d’s sake) are all the Trump administration now encourages to come into the US.

Too many Black and Brown people have already arrived from “shithole countries,” they say, and it’s time for them to leave. Stephen Miller’s white supremacist project to ethnically re-engineer the country runs faster every week.

If you’re a white person who voted for this administration and you’re now telling your gay nephew or your Korean-American daughter-in-law or your Mexican-American grandkids that you don’t see what the big deal is, you’re asking them to make peace with the fact that the people running the country have, on the record, in their own voices, described a future in which they don’t exist here.

The economic case the administration likes to make is that all of this cruelty is somehow “necessary” because immigrants are “draining the country.” But that, in particular, is simply an establishing lie.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 alone, and that in forty states they pay a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top one percent of households living alongside them. Every million undocumented people deported represents about $8.9 billion in lost annual tax revenue, money that funds the schools and hospitals and roads in the very communities now cheering ICE on.

And the criminal rationale, the one that animates every Fox “News” chyron about “foreign rapists,” collapses just as fast: ICE’s own fiscal year 2025 enforcement data shows 127 sexual offense arrests in a country where the FBI logged roughly 127,000 reported rapes by US citizens, and RAINN estimates closer to 443,000 actual incidents of sexual violence every year.

Meanwhile, Trump has issued an executive order labeling Americans dissenting from his racist, fascist, so-called “Christian” policies as domestic terrorists, and they’ve begun investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning people for being anti-fascist or “Antifa” when the organization doesn’t even exist.

We’re dismantling due process, abandoning habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, and building concentration camps against a population that accounts for less than a tenth of one percent of the sexual violence in this country. The numbers don’t support the policy, though, because the economics were never the point, other than the number of Black and Brown people arriving on our shores since 1965.

This is why people are walking away from their relatives and didn’t show up for July 4th picnics, and why the people walking away aren’t, in fact, “being petty.”

When someone you love votes for a candidate who has promised, in plain English, to do something cruel and unconstitutional and historically catastrophic, and then he does exactly that, and they still defend him, the relationship isn’t being broken by your refusal to overlook it.

The relationship was broken when they cast the vote. You’re just the one acknowledging the damage.

Gutfeld and his colleagues want to frame all of this as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as a kind of emotional incontinence on the left. But there’s a much older word for refusing to extend warmth and intimacy to people who’ve signed off on the persecution of your neighbors and those who stand for democracy against authoritarianism, and it’s not derangement.

It’s conscience.

The Germans who quietly stopped inviting their Nazi-sympathizing brothers-in-law to dinner in 1934 weren’t being dramatic. They were doing the only honest thing left to do, and most of them, looking back from the rubble in 1946, wished they’d done it sooner and louder.

We’re not in 1934 yet. The midterms are five months away. The country still has somewhat functioning courts (other than SCOTUS), a free press that’s bruised but breathing, and the kind of organized opposition that can flip a House and possibly even Senate majority if enough of us show up.

Look up the local organizations doing rapid-response work for detained families through groups like the Detention Watch Network.

And when the MAGA friend or relative in your life asks why you’ve gone quiet, you don’t owe them a fight and you don’t owe them an apology. You owe them, if you choose to give it at all, the truth: that you saw what they helped build, and you’ve decided you’d rather associate with someone else.

The rest of this year is going to demand more of us than ever before. Pretending otherwise is no longer an option.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They’re Shocked We Don’t Pretend Anymore”

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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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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.