Hey, it’s Thom,
I noticed you’ve been opening our newsletters. Nearly all of them. And I’m grateful — I mean that. But I see you still haven’t subscribed.
I’m not going to try to guilt you; I know how many asks are hitting your inbox. But I want to ask you something directly: will you become a paid subscriber to The Hartmann Report today?
Here’s why it matters.
It starts in 1967, when I was 16.
I’d grown up in a conservative Republican family in Michigan, and just two years earlier I’d gone door-to-door alongside my dad campaigning for Barry Goldwater. Then Vietnam and the Civil Rights movements happened, and something in me shifted. I started asking questions.
And when I didn’t like the answers, I did the thing that would end up shaping the rest of my life: I founded a newspaper and used it to speak out against the war and the ongoing treatment of women and Black people.
My high school threw me out for it.
Now, nearly sixty years later, I’m still digging, still reporting, still writing and publishing insights and information the powers that be would simply prefer were ignored.
I’ve been at this a long time. In 1996, I wrote The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight to bring climate science to people who’d never heard the truth about what we’re doing to this planet. When George W. Bush was beating the war drums for Iraq in 2003, I threw myself into politics, drafting the business plan for Air America and helping get that network on the air.
That same year, I published my first political book, Screwed: The Undeclared War on the Middle Class, to document clearly and unambiguously what all those years of Reaganism had done to working people (it opens with the story of my dad dying of mesothelioma he got from working in a steel mill when I was a baby and the asbestos industry already knew they were killing him and others of his generation).
For these past sixty years, I’ve kept on trying to tell the same truth: that working people are getting robbed by this nation’s oligarchs, that our democracy is fragile, and that the morbidly rich will always try to silence the ones asking why.
Today, the threat is bigger than anything I’ve covered in my life. The two biggest social media platforms — both owned by rightwing billionaires — have shadow-banned my work, making it much harder to let more people know about this newsletter.
Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch controls Fox; CBS is controlled by a MAGA-friendly nepo-baby billionaire. The oligarchs are buying up what’s left of American media, and they’re counting on you to get tired and look away. That’s their entire strategy, the one Steve Bannon bragged about when he said the Trump administration was going to be “flooding the zone with shit” until the American people couldn’t tell the truth from the BS.
So, fighting against this and against huge odds and massive power on the hard-right side, I need your help.
There’s no billionaire funding the Hartmann Report and Louise and I have no corporate advertisers we have to please. We rely on readers like you for 100% of this work.
Our independence is the most important thing the oligarchs can’t buy and can’t kill. But it’s also fragile, because our continuing this 7-days-a-week work depends entirely on you. As the old saying goes: “Nobody is coming to save us; it’s just us now.” We need to step up to meet the moment.
Jeff Bezos won’t do this, and Elon Musk explicitly hopes to end liberal media altogether. The MAGA oligarchs swallowing America’s media are counting on you to sit on your hands and do nothing.
I hate to say it, but it’s true. And I want us to prove them wrong.
They threw me out of school for publishing the truth when I was sixteen. I never stopped. Help me make sure I never have to.
— Thom Hartmann
P.S. If you can’t afford a subscription, I completely understand. Please share my newsletters with someone who needs to know. But if you’ve been meaning to subscribe and just haven’t gotten around to it, this is the moment. The work in front of us is too important to face with an empty tank.