Now is the time for Republicans to show the courage of Mandy Connell and loudly and publicly leave their party. As Germans learned by the late 1930s, if they don’t act now it may soon be too late...
In the 1920's, the KKK had several million members, including a big group here, in Denver. The KKK went to Germany and taught Hitler's 'Brown Shirts' how to roll. Really! Trump's father was a card-carrying member of the KKK; where do you think Trump got it? The greater the hate the greater the fear underlying it. To quote the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 'Fear is a corrosive, evil thread running through the fabric of our lives.' The Germans, the Nazis hated Jews and Blacks because... they were afraid of them. As for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she's got hundreds of chicken farms (if you can call them that) and Walmart in her backyard - of course she supports child labor!
After visiting Gettysburgh multiple times I will always associate President Eisenhower with that very important place where the powers of hate and human exploitation were defeated at great cost to this country. Gettysburgh is the place where the confederacy might have had its best chance to attack Washington had it won the battle - the place where the stakes were highest. It then became the place where president Lincoln defined American democracy - something being lost with the our "originalist" legal authorities measuring the core values of america only according to the standards of the 1780s.
Is seen as such a negative to haters . Its a kind of insistence on staying unknowing and unaccepting of what is .
This we’ve seen in the parents who do not want their children to feel any discomfort at all in school.
So no subjects that make them feel anything like compassion or empathy or distress. Its a game of ‘ lets pretend it didn’t happen ‘. A convenient but not real concept . So I’m proud to be ‘ woke’.
Im not always happy in reality but I know what it is .
I don’t hide from it .
Sometimes I feel like i want to hide. But reality is actually comforting .
Again Thom thank you for this “ wake the Hhhll UP” article. I agree hate, fear and contempt of others is the guiding mantra of the right wingers. It’s been obvious since the days of Ronny raygun’s reign and in the decades since of targeted policies aimed at anyone not rich ,white and pseudo -Christian. Republican administrations’ war on the poor, POC, LGBTQ and women have been remarkably successful due to the unquestioned cult-like loyalty of their base. The roll of Faux noise network can’t be underscored either for the damage they have done to gullible willfully ignorant Americans. Mouthpieces like Tucker, Hannity, Limbaugh, Ingram etc. have appealed to the hate and blame, take no responsibility mind melt right wing base that Trump, Desantis and others are pandering to. Somehow we as Americans have let the racist, hate mongering minority crazies take power and bend the spotlight in their favor. This is where I believe the media has failed us by not fully pushing back on the lies and reporting facts regardless of political leanings. Click bait “ news flashes “ seem to be the extent of network reporting these days, geared to attract a short attention span audience without depth or fully reporting facts. So far I am not impressed by billionaires owning media companies.
If I didn't know better, I would think that you were nuts! This is scary stuff that we thought would never happen here! I am thankful for now that I live in Oregon and all three of my reps do their job well and work for we the people or they at least try. What's next Thom, what can we the people do to bring our country back from the edge, the abyss?
I believe that if not for the federal system of fifty semi-sovereign states American democracy, as we know (knew?) it, would have been swept away long ago, replaced with some right wing dystopian nightmare social order. I often wonder if a 'more perfect union' is even possible in light of the ever swirling 'eternal sea' of adversarial politics as played in the US. But then, democracy, wherever practiced, has often been debate with a cane or fists. Or, the modern equivalent, social media and performance politics. I like to think of Republicans as envisioned by Rep. Jaime Raskin, WWE wrestlers in costumes jumping from the ropes to entertain the wingos and scam them for their nickels and dimes.
Ha, I wouldn't be a pimple on the butt of a real head-shrinker, but sometimes I play one on the Thom Hartmann Report for the pure hell of it. So here goes, but consider the source:
Fear is one of those generalized words, like socialism, that must be distinctly relative to something else to have any real meaning. Starting with the dreaded "S" word — I mean, everything is socialism, right? The whole amazing planet, isolated in space, evolved into one big, near perfect socialized globe all by itself, so to speak, the gods notwithstanding. Disparate people inevitably banded together in ever-growing groups and decided what was in the best interests of everyone involved, essentially achieved through compromise. That is socialism at its core happening naturally. In fact, the very concept of government in the first place is a socialistic construct of a collective human mind inspired and conditioned by the supreme balance in nature that allowed us to evolve, is it not?
But as they say, the devil's in the details: Giving away the whole store, economically and politically, to cold-hearted, psychopathic billionaires and their buddies is bad socialism. Helping the middle class, the disadvantaged, and especially the common working women and man — ninety-some percent of the workforce — is good socialism. (And we desperately need more of that good stuff in this old rundown saloon instead of the watered-down rot-gut served up by the scrubby Republican barkeeps.)
Same with fear. The fear encountering a grizzly bear is an instant, palpable physical fear ... and a damn good one at that, lol! The fear of indicting, trying, sentencing and jailing the worst criminally minded president in American history, so that the dirty bastard can't damage our democracy any further, is the fear of a coward, an enabler (or a traitor, god forbid) people who can't face the ugly truth, neither outwardly nor inwardly.
And I'm not alluding to Merrick Garland per se. The towering, intimidating edifice of our domestic justice/political/economic system is based on instilling a healthy fear in lawbreakers, pinned to principles of fairness and accountability (by theory, anyway). Yet, hugely ironically, this badass system cowers before the worst lawbreakers of all, the ones with all the money and power to skirt the law. And, irony upon irony, the big guys love to abuse the same system that facilitated their own rise in fortunes while denying "others" similar benefits and opportunities. As Alan Greenspan once quipped (paraphrased), "Complex economic jargon is meant to confuse."
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." - Wizard of Oz (Where we live.)
Sorry to compare the constant and horrible fear despite the love that a battered spouse must feel, keeping her or him bound to an abuser, but it's kind of like that: the "battered-wife syndrome" on a political level. There's an unnamed, deeply psychological fear of some amorphous hurt yet to come, of not becoming, or of being without. In comparing ourselves, such as to other people's lives outwardly or to our own fractured thoughts inwardly, either negatively or positively — or to anything at all: wealth, poverty, status, success or failure, etc. — we set up an unconscious process of mentally induced fear through our own artificial constructs buried within, which strengthen that looming, hard-to-pin-down feeling of dread.
Countless artificial fears rule us as we try to navigate our treacherous daily lives in this highly stressful society, based on forces pulling in opposite directions, twisting our minds and emotions into hopeless knots. It's a driven desire to gain and a tormenting fear of losing. When all the ensuant pain and delusions of individual minds coalesce into opposing political parties in the real world out to win at all costs, intense psychological fear — and the accompanying hate and violence — spreads through an angry population like wildfire.
The Republican insurrectionists in Congress know full well what incites their zombie armies. Grizzly bears are far less dangerous. (Although there's nothing wrong with a good jolt of honest fear now and then to keep one honest, I don't advocate letting grizzlies loose in the Capitol. That would be too much like the Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Ron Johnson coo-coo caucus). But we should fear what can kill us. Climate destruction and the pollution of the land, water, and air springs foremost to mind, as do nuclear weapons and weapons of war on civilian streets and in our schools, inadequate social nets, fealty to Wall Street tycoons and their destructive industries, etc., etc. The list is long.
So put the fear of God in your elected officials to run roughshod over the actual "takers" running and ruining this whole stupid shit-show. It's a call for more regulation, not less! It must have been FDR, Bernie, Paul Wellstone (same thing), or maybe Thom, who once said something like, "The main problem facing our democracy is not big government in business; it's big business in government."
Except as a matter of principle, what's the point of leaving a political party? The GOP has already shown that it doesn't give a crap about anything but grabbing power. It claims the elections it loses on their being "rigged," and once it regains the WH, it will shut down free elections and replace them with the fake ones common in banana republics and authoritarian governments. Red states are already preparing to do this in 2024.
At every turn, the adults in the Republican Party could have taken over and kicked Trump to the curb. The second impeachment was a no-brain-er, but they chose to wait to see if they could take back the whole Congress. Trump failed them, and they continually fail to do the right thing. They could have loudly denounced the racism and kept denouncing it in a platform. Oh, sorry, Republicans don't even have a platform. They have ceased to stand FOR anything, but just what you said, Thom, hate with a capital H-A-T-E.
Wonder what that's like, losing a conservative institution you have had faith in all your life. Even worse having it hijacked by low-information voters that LIKE being lied to. They've gone from William F. Buckley to the QAnon Shaman, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
My BFF is a German whom I met in grad school 45 years ago. We discovered that we had a lot in common such as his aunt lived in the same Chicago suburb in which I was raised. I was there the nite he met his wife, stood up at their wedding, and watched their two boyd grow to manhood. Over time, I could not understand how his grandparents and other relatives, who were decent, moral, loving people let Hitler happen. Today, I feel like I am experiencing what they experienced back in the 30's, and it disgusts me that America seems to be goosestepping in line with Hitler's Nazis. We just shrug off Clinton's basket of deplorables (aka MAGAs) as if they are just a few trashy people with big mouths - annoying but harmless. Hitler did not get elected to dictator his first try either.
Back in 2018, I sent an email to Prof Bob Paxton an emeritus history prof from Columbia and renowned expert on Fascism. Having read his book "The Anatomy of Fascism" it seemed to me that Trump fit his definition of fascist like a glove. He politely wrote back and said he did not think so. Then in 2021, Paxton wrote an OpEd in Newsweek: "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now." We have watched as his administration attracted psychopaths and con artists from all over the country. Many are overtly racist and antisemitic. Like Hitler, Trump embraced Christian Nationalism to coopt the anti-abortionist vote while scandal after scandal in his personal life pointed to an ongoing history of serial Christian sin.
Today, Trump's mini-me, Governator DeSantis is turning my state into a fascist stronghold. We are book burning, ratting out neighbors and teachers who violate his 'Christian" behavioral norms. He is in the process of criminalizing any Floridian who associates with an "illegal alien" even if they do not know it. You cannot say, be, or think gay. You cannot acknowledge America's history of racism in any classroom K thru PhD. DeSantis is taking over businesses, school boards, universities, and even firing elected prosecutors for not being rough enough of minorities. Soon, we elderly will no longer be able to vote by mail, which means not vote at all for most of us because we cannot stand in 3-hour-long lines without water in the Florida heat just to vote.
So, now, I understand why the families of my many German and Austrian friends went to "heil," and it makes me sad that our Democracy has turned out to be a gaslight after all.
To paraphrase the "Peace Prayer" of St. Francis "Be an instrument of Peace, where there is Hatred,
BE Loving". Today such an aspiration is considered being WOKE, another pejorative of the hate-mongers, and much more venomous than PC (politically correct). If being WOKE makes me an object of their hate, then, like FDR "I welcome their hatred." It assures me that I'm on the right path.
In support of Marc S's comment, "The Gettysburg Address" should be the daily secular prayer of every Democracy-loving American reminding us that this is not the first time Democracy has hung in the balance and that we must continue "to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which the gave the last full measure of devotion."
Thom, I suggest putting a link to "The Gettysburg Address" to your daily "Report" so that your readers can read and meditate daily on this most important, perhaps inspired, speech by any American.
In the 1920's, the KKK had several million members, including a big group here, in Denver. The KKK went to Germany and taught Hitler's 'Brown Shirts' how to roll. Really! Trump's father was a card-carrying member of the KKK; where do you think Trump got it? The greater the hate the greater the fear underlying it. To quote the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 'Fear is a corrosive, evil thread running through the fabric of our lives.' The Germans, the Nazis hated Jews and Blacks because... they were afraid of them. As for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she's got hundreds of chicken farms (if you can call them that) and Walmart in her backyard - of course she supports child labor!
After visiting Gettysburgh multiple times I will always associate President Eisenhower with that very important place where the powers of hate and human exploitation were defeated at great cost to this country. Gettysburgh is the place where the confederacy might have had its best chance to attack Washington had it won the battle - the place where the stakes were highest. It then became the place where president Lincoln defined American democracy - something being lost with the our "originalist" legal authorities measuring the core values of america only according to the standards of the 1780s.
Is seen as such a negative to haters . Its a kind of insistence on staying unknowing and unaccepting of what is .
This we’ve seen in the parents who do not want their children to feel any discomfort at all in school.
So no subjects that make them feel anything like compassion or empathy or distress. Its a game of ‘ lets pretend it didn’t happen ‘. A convenient but not real concept . So I’m proud to be ‘ woke’.
Im not always happy in reality but I know what it is .
I don’t hide from it .
Sometimes I feel like i want to hide. But reality is actually comforting .
And sometimes almost terrifying.
Again Thom thank you for this “ wake the Hhhll UP” article. I agree hate, fear and contempt of others is the guiding mantra of the right wingers. It’s been obvious since the days of Ronny raygun’s reign and in the decades since of targeted policies aimed at anyone not rich ,white and pseudo -Christian. Republican administrations’ war on the poor, POC, LGBTQ and women have been remarkably successful due to the unquestioned cult-like loyalty of their base. The roll of Faux noise network can’t be underscored either for the damage they have done to gullible willfully ignorant Americans. Mouthpieces like Tucker, Hannity, Limbaugh, Ingram etc. have appealed to the hate and blame, take no responsibility mind melt right wing base that Trump, Desantis and others are pandering to. Somehow we as Americans have let the racist, hate mongering minority crazies take power and bend the spotlight in their favor. This is where I believe the media has failed us by not fully pushing back on the lies and reporting facts regardless of political leanings. Click bait “ news flashes “ seem to be the extent of network reporting these days, geared to attract a short attention span audience without depth or fully reporting facts. So far I am not impressed by billionaires owning media companies.
If I didn't know better, I would think that you were nuts! This is scary stuff that we thought would never happen here! I am thankful for now that I live in Oregon and all three of my reps do their job well and work for we the people or they at least try. What's next Thom, what can we the people do to bring our country back from the edge, the abyss?
What a great article about a frightening subject.
I have no doubt in my mind that this could spiral into civil war.
Mostly because so many of the Republicans wear their hate as a badge of honor.
I think up until recently, Democrats believed it was best to ‘kind of’ ignore it and hope it would burn itself out.
But as you stated Thom,
It just keeps growing and looks for pockets to hide in .
It is a ‘Sepsis’ of our culture. In fact the very fear that precipitates hate creates a twisted power effect in the hater .
There is apparently a payoff for this perpetual hate and its a sense of Power and Superiority over anyone thats not just like them .
The ‘dividers’ know this and they use it accordingly.
Those that embrace diversity are seen as weak
and ‘ woke’ . How interesting that ‘woke’ which imparts a positive
I believe that if not for the federal system of fifty semi-sovereign states American democracy, as we know (knew?) it, would have been swept away long ago, replaced with some right wing dystopian nightmare social order. I often wonder if a 'more perfect union' is even possible in light of the ever swirling 'eternal sea' of adversarial politics as played in the US. But then, democracy, wherever practiced, has often been debate with a cane or fists. Or, the modern equivalent, social media and performance politics. I like to think of Republicans as envisioned by Rep. Jaime Raskin, WWE wrestlers in costumes jumping from the ropes to entertain the wingos and scam them for their nickels and dimes.
Fear and Hate:
The handmaidens of Fascism.
Ha, I wouldn't be a pimple on the butt of a real head-shrinker, but sometimes I play one on the Thom Hartmann Report for the pure hell of it. So here goes, but consider the source:
Fear is one of those generalized words, like socialism, that must be distinctly relative to something else to have any real meaning. Starting with the dreaded "S" word — I mean, everything is socialism, right? The whole amazing planet, isolated in space, evolved into one big, near perfect socialized globe all by itself, so to speak, the gods notwithstanding. Disparate people inevitably banded together in ever-growing groups and decided what was in the best interests of everyone involved, essentially achieved through compromise. That is socialism at its core happening naturally. In fact, the very concept of government in the first place is a socialistic construct of a collective human mind inspired and conditioned by the supreme balance in nature that allowed us to evolve, is it not?
But as they say, the devil's in the details: Giving away the whole store, economically and politically, to cold-hearted, psychopathic billionaires and their buddies is bad socialism. Helping the middle class, the disadvantaged, and especially the common working women and man — ninety-some percent of the workforce — is good socialism. (And we desperately need more of that good stuff in this old rundown saloon instead of the watered-down rot-gut served up by the scrubby Republican barkeeps.)
Same with fear. The fear encountering a grizzly bear is an instant, palpable physical fear ... and a damn good one at that, lol! The fear of indicting, trying, sentencing and jailing the worst criminally minded president in American history, so that the dirty bastard can't damage our democracy any further, is the fear of a coward, an enabler (or a traitor, god forbid) people who can't face the ugly truth, neither outwardly nor inwardly.
And I'm not alluding to Merrick Garland per se. The towering, intimidating edifice of our domestic justice/political/economic system is based on instilling a healthy fear in lawbreakers, pinned to principles of fairness and accountability (by theory, anyway). Yet, hugely ironically, this badass system cowers before the worst lawbreakers of all, the ones with all the money and power to skirt the law. And, irony upon irony, the big guys love to abuse the same system that facilitated their own rise in fortunes while denying "others" similar benefits and opportunities. As Alan Greenspan once quipped (paraphrased), "Complex economic jargon is meant to confuse."
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." - Wizard of Oz (Where we live.)
Sorry to compare the constant and horrible fear despite the love that a battered spouse must feel, keeping her or him bound to an abuser, but it's kind of like that: the "battered-wife syndrome" on a political level. There's an unnamed, deeply psychological fear of some amorphous hurt yet to come, of not becoming, or of being without. In comparing ourselves, such as to other people's lives outwardly or to our own fractured thoughts inwardly, either negatively or positively — or to anything at all: wealth, poverty, status, success or failure, etc. — we set up an unconscious process of mentally induced fear through our own artificial constructs buried within, which strengthen that looming, hard-to-pin-down feeling of dread.
Countless artificial fears rule us as we try to navigate our treacherous daily lives in this highly stressful society, based on forces pulling in opposite directions, twisting our minds and emotions into hopeless knots. It's a driven desire to gain and a tormenting fear of losing. When all the ensuant pain and delusions of individual minds coalesce into opposing political parties in the real world out to win at all costs, intense psychological fear — and the accompanying hate and violence — spreads through an angry population like wildfire.
The Republican insurrectionists in Congress know full well what incites their zombie armies. Grizzly bears are far less dangerous. (Although there's nothing wrong with a good jolt of honest fear now and then to keep one honest, I don't advocate letting grizzlies loose in the Capitol. That would be too much like the Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Ron Johnson coo-coo caucus). But we should fear what can kill us. Climate destruction and the pollution of the land, water, and air springs foremost to mind, as do nuclear weapons and weapons of war on civilian streets and in our schools, inadequate social nets, fealty to Wall Street tycoons and their destructive industries, etc., etc. The list is long.
So put the fear of God in your elected officials to run roughshod over the actual "takers" running and ruining this whole stupid shit-show. It's a call for more regulation, not less! It must have been FDR, Bernie, Paul Wellstone (same thing), or maybe Thom, who once said something like, "The main problem facing our democracy is not big government in business; it's big business in government."
End of rant.
Except as a matter of principle, what's the point of leaving a political party? The GOP has already shown that it doesn't give a crap about anything but grabbing power. It claims the elections it loses on their being "rigged," and once it regains the WH, it will shut down free elections and replace them with the fake ones common in banana republics and authoritarian governments. Red states are already preparing to do this in 2024.
At every turn, the adults in the Republican Party could have taken over and kicked Trump to the curb. The second impeachment was a no-brain-er, but they chose to wait to see if they could take back the whole Congress. Trump failed them, and they continually fail to do the right thing. They could have loudly denounced the racism and kept denouncing it in a platform. Oh, sorry, Republicans don't even have a platform. They have ceased to stand FOR anything, but just what you said, Thom, hate with a capital H-A-T-E.
Wonder what that's like, losing a conservative institution you have had faith in all your life. Even worse having it hijacked by low-information voters that LIKE being lied to. They've gone from William F. Buckley to the QAnon Shaman, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
My BFF is a German whom I met in grad school 45 years ago. We discovered that we had a lot in common such as his aunt lived in the same Chicago suburb in which I was raised. I was there the nite he met his wife, stood up at their wedding, and watched their two boyd grow to manhood. Over time, I could not understand how his grandparents and other relatives, who were decent, moral, loving people let Hitler happen. Today, I feel like I am experiencing what they experienced back in the 30's, and it disgusts me that America seems to be goosestepping in line with Hitler's Nazis. We just shrug off Clinton's basket of deplorables (aka MAGAs) as if they are just a few trashy people with big mouths - annoying but harmless. Hitler did not get elected to dictator his first try either.
Back in 2018, I sent an email to Prof Bob Paxton an emeritus history prof from Columbia and renowned expert on Fascism. Having read his book "The Anatomy of Fascism" it seemed to me that Trump fit his definition of fascist like a glove. He politely wrote back and said he did not think so. Then in 2021, Paxton wrote an OpEd in Newsweek: "I've Hesitated to Call Donald Trump a Fascist. Until Now." We have watched as his administration attracted psychopaths and con artists from all over the country. Many are overtly racist and antisemitic. Like Hitler, Trump embraced Christian Nationalism to coopt the anti-abortionist vote while scandal after scandal in his personal life pointed to an ongoing history of serial Christian sin.
Today, Trump's mini-me, Governator DeSantis is turning my state into a fascist stronghold. We are book burning, ratting out neighbors and teachers who violate his 'Christian" behavioral norms. He is in the process of criminalizing any Floridian who associates with an "illegal alien" even if they do not know it. You cannot say, be, or think gay. You cannot acknowledge America's history of racism in any classroom K thru PhD. DeSantis is taking over businesses, school boards, universities, and even firing elected prosecutors for not being rough enough of minorities. Soon, we elderly will no longer be able to vote by mail, which means not vote at all for most of us because we cannot stand in 3-hour-long lines without water in the Florida heat just to vote.
So, now, I understand why the families of my many German and Austrian friends went to "heil," and it makes me sad that our Democracy has turned out to be a gaslight after all.
To paraphrase the "Peace Prayer" of St. Francis "Be an instrument of Peace, where there is Hatred,
BE Loving". Today such an aspiration is considered being WOKE, another pejorative of the hate-mongers, and much more venomous than PC (politically correct). If being WOKE makes me an object of their hate, then, like FDR "I welcome their hatred." It assures me that I'm on the right path.
In support of Marc S's comment, "The Gettysburg Address" should be the daily secular prayer of every Democracy-loving American reminding us that this is not the first time Democracy has hung in the balance and that we must continue "to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which the gave the last full measure of devotion."
Thom, I suggest putting a link to "The Gettysburg Address" to your daily "Report" so that your readers can read and meditate daily on this most important, perhaps inspired, speech by any American.
maybe we could all live in Maryland--with love in the constitution, and with a new governor is bringing Marvin Gaye back!!
THOM: the caller that recommended OTM'S
"Divided Dial" is correct. It is truly a 'must listen'.