Welcome to Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club, one of the perks of your subscription to the Hartmann Report. We’ll be meeting live on the last Sunday of every month at noon ET, 9 am PT. One book a month.
And the timing couldn’t be better.
On July 30th, a federal appeals court gave Arkansas the green light to start arresting librarians. Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin enthusiastically praised the neo-Nazi-style book-banning ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.”
Act 372 makes it a crime to hand a minor any “harmful item,” is punishable by up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine, and it lets city and county rightwing politicians decide what books, newspapers, and magazines are “harmful.”
And it doesn’t name or define books, so librarians are stuck guessing what some rightwinger is going to be offended by. Caution, of course, will be the word of the day, and kids will be the ones suffering.
PEN America counted 6,870 rightwing book bans in just one single school year, 2025, across 23 states. The American Library Association identified 4,235 titles challenged by these neo-Nazis in 2025: 92% of those challenges came from hardcore rightwing pressure groups and hard-right politicians.
Under 3% of the calls to ban books came from an actual parent worried about an actual kid.
PEN’s newest report found bans on nonfiction more than doubled this year, with over 1,100 history books, biographies, and memoirs pulled off shelves. They’re not chasing Lady Chatterly’s Lover; they’re going after books that warn about what’s happening right now in this country. Books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.
When I was a kid in Lansing, the library was just a few miles from our house and there was also a great library in my school. While librarians were happy to make recommendations and check me out, nobody ever questioned what I took home or asked my parents to sign off.
Upper- and middle-class kids will be able to get around these bans by simply buying their own books, but rural, Black, and lower-income children will be hit hard as our libraries become more and more anodyne. Researchers went through 20 years of federal time-use data covering 236,000 Americans and found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped from 28% to 16% over just the past 20 years.
So let’s do something about it together.
Some months will be my books, and on others I’ll try to bring the author on and you’ll get to talk directly with them. Some months we’ll take on something written 50 or 150 years ago, other times brand new releases, and every book we discuss will have one thing in common: it made somebody powerful uncomfortable.
Our first book is my most recent one, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, which came out July 7th. We’ll meet to discuss it in 2 weeks, on the morning of Sunday, August 30th.
In 1886 — contrary to what many lawyers learned in law school — the Supreme Court did not rule that corporations are people. The justices ducked the question entirely. But the Court’s reporter, a former railroad president and Very Wealthy Guy named J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote a headnote saying they had.
That one sentence — which had no legal stature — became the foundation for American corporate power in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, continued straight through to Citizens United, and legalized the billions that the morbidly rich are right now showering on their toady politicians.
Get the book however you like. Your free local library probably has it or can order it, and your local independent bookstore will order it happily. Or use Powells.com, our local bookstore here in Portland, which is a real gem, unionized, and has a huge inventory (it’s literally an entire city block and 4 stories high, all filled with books!).
They’re banning books because books have been foundational to positive political change from the beginning of our republic to today. So let’s read the dangerous ones together, and discuss them in a room they can’t close.
I’ll see you in the chat. Let’s all be troublemakers together. Here’s an excerpt from:
Chapter 11: The Deflection Playbook
Culture War as a Substitute for Economic Reform
The most sophisticated deflection program that today’s oligarchs are using to conceal their corporate theft of human rights is their so-called culture war itself.
“Woke” has become their all-purpose slur. They slap it on civil rights advocacy, diversity initiatives, LGBTQ equality, labor activism, honest history, and even environmental protection.
The brilliance of this kind of “anti-woke” propaganda is that it helps politicians and the people who design their political ads create what looks like a widespread voter backlash while never having to talk about the real issues that actually affect average Americans like taxes, wages, monopolies, or healthcare.
Instead of debating whether hedge funds should be allowed to buy up single-family homes (as is happening today, driving our housing crisis), the nation is forced to fight over whether schools should have books on the shelves that talk about about diverse families or the difficulties Black people have faced throughout American history.
Attacks like these on America’s schools, libraries, and public institutions like this work well for both the oligarchs and their predatory corporations. When America’s oligarchs can convince people that schools are “indoctrinating” or “mutilating” their children, that libraries are “grooming” them, and that universities are “brainwashing” them, they succeed in delegitimize the very institutions that traditionally have taught people to question oligarchic power.
The goal of these memes and the billionaire-owned rightwing media’s constant flood of moral-outrage stories isn’t really to protect children or preserve “family values.” Instead, it’s done explicitly to prevent any sort of economic solidarity from forming through keeping people battling each other over phony issues of “cultural identity.”
“Fraud” Narratives That Justify Voter Suppression
The deflection playbook being run by America’s oligarchs even extends to our democracy itself.
When elections are framed as inherently fraudulent—when Republicans claim “illegal votes” explain every Republican loss—it gets a whole heck of a lot easier to justify restrictive voting rules that drive down turnout. Voter ID requirements disproportionately affect poor voters, while the GOP has been on a fifty-year voter roll–purging binge going back to the days of William Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye that mostly targets communities of color.
Reporter Greg Palast reports that Black people are 400 percent more likely to have their ballots thrown out than white people; months before the 2000 election in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush had around ninety thousand Black people purged from that state’s voting rolls, giving room for his brother George to win the state by 537 votes.
Using data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, Palast discovered that voter suppression led to 14.1 million voters having their ballots disqualified in the 2024 election that Trump “won” by a margin of only two million votes.
Around five million voters were purged from voter rolls without credible justification in the months leading up to the election, and another two million mail-in ballots were challenged by Republican “poll monitors” and then disqualified for minor clerical errors (e.g., postage due). Another roughly eight hundred thousand ballots were disqualified or rejected for other, non-credible reasons, and over 3.24 million new registrations were rejected in 2024 without credible evidence.
“Fraud” also supposedly justifies reducing polling places in urban areas and doing away with drop boxes, while also limiting early voting and vote by mail.
The actual evidence of voter fraud in America is vanishingly small, as study after study has found that fraudulent voting is extremely rare and there’s not a single election in our lifetimes that’s been flipped because of it. But evidence isn’t the point for the oligarchs. The goal is to make voting itself suspect, to thus create a pretext for rules that make it harder and harder for working-class people and minorities to participate in our democracy.
Corporations support these policies because if working-class people voted in proportion to their numbers—if they weren’t suppressed and gerrymandered and discouraged—they’d almost certainly vote for economic policies that threaten oligarchic power. As we saw in New York City in 2005, they’d vote to tax wealth, strengthen unions, regulate corporations, and rebuild the social contract.
War, the Ultimate Deflection
In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge to Keep.
Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam War and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little three-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.
Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004:
I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999. . . . One of the things [Bush] said to me is: “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait), and he wasted it. . . . If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.
The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to be seen as a commander--in-chief when our guy Osama bin Laden—who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan—engineered an attack on New York and DC.
The crime was planned in Germany and Florida. On 9/11 bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan: “CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorists’ attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the US war on terror in Afghanistan.” When the Obama administration finally caught and killed bin Laden, he was again in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.
But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run al-Qaeda training camps there, unrelated to 9/11, but they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.
Trump reprised the strategy in 2025, becoming the first American president to bomb seven different countries in one year prior to his 2026 invasion of Venezuela and bombing of Iran. Keep them occupied with the external enemy, and they’ll fail to notice who’s draining their bank accounts and stealing their wages.
Breaking the Spell
Every element of this oligarch’s deflection playbook serves a single purpose: preventing working-class solidarity.
The oligarchs know that they’re outnumbered and that if working people across racial, religious, and cultural lines ever united around their shared economic interests, oligarch power would crumble. The deflection playbook was created and is maintained to make sure that never happens.
White workers are taught to resent Black workers. Native-born workers are taught to fear immigrant workers. Rural workers are taught to despise urban workers. Christian workers are taught to distrust Muslim workers. Straight workers are taught to feel threatened by LGBTQ workers.
All of us are taught by oligarch media to blame each other for the declining American Dream, while never, ever mentioning the actual oligarchs and their corporations who actually killed it.
Corporate constitutional rights gave the oligarchs the legal weapons they needed to destroy unions, slash taxes, offshore jobs, and capture control of our government. The deflection playbook and Reagan’s ending the Fairness Doctrine gave them the necessary propaganda tools to prevent working-class people from ever launching a democratic response.
While the constitutional amendment we need to pass will strip corporations of their legal weapons, we also need to strip the oligarchs of these propaganda weapons.
That means calling out and naming these types of deflections when we see them.
Sounds great. I really like the name "Well-Read Troublemakers". Looking forward to it.
Glad you did not link Bezos' Behemoth for the book order but bookshop.org would be even better. https://bookshop.org/a/121852/9798890572639
Bookshop.org is a network of independent booksellers that passes on much of the proceeds, even for online orders, to real independent brick-and-mortar stores.
Marion the Librarian will need to get the hell out of Little Rock. They cannot afford the brain-drain result of this stupid law. Good thing Dolly Parton lives in Tennessee!
The most valuable possession I've always owned is my library card.
More good-trouble from the folks at Thom Hartmann---I like it! See you in the streets.