MAGA pastor who wants to end female voting rights compares women to pigs

The Hartmann Report, this little newsletter that Louise and I started in our living room and our old friend and business partner Nigel helps us administer, hits 100,000 daily readers this weekend. Over 90% of our growth has come about as the result of word-of-mouth; people sharing this newsletter with their friends, relatives, and coworkers. We are so honored to have your trust in our research and hard work, and really appreciate your sharing my articles with others. Thank you!

— The Massive Scale of Trump’s Deportation Plans. Trump and Vance are promising to deport 15 million people from America, a massive undertaking that will require a major departure from our traditions and laws providing for due process. “You go to the red state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard.’ We will deputize them as immigration enforcement officers,” notorious racist and Trump ally Stephen Miller said recently. Those soldiers — not police officers — would then “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Melissa Gira Grant wrote a brilliant piece about this obscenity for The New Republic that’s well worth a read, and it’s vital to remember that Trump is setting up something that appears inspired by Hitler’s early pogroms of the Jews. What will you do and say when they knock on your door — particularly if you have a last name that sounds Hispanic — and demand to see your citizenship papers? This is the world these bizarre men want to plunge us into, and, tragically, half the country appears to be just fine with it. What the hell has happened to our nation? I lay most of the blame at the feet of the billionaires like Murdoch, etc., who’ve been funding rightwing hate media for decades.

— One of the reasons our media so rarely reports on the obscene things that Trump says at his rallies is that they are terrified of his followers. A woman reporter showed up at a Trump rally and was assaulted by the fascists in attendance, as reported by the International Women’s Media Foundation. The Trump-cult followers surrounding her screamed, “I hope you’re murdered,” “I hope you’re dismembered,” and “I hope someone rapes you before they murder you,” along with other hateful epithets. This is typical of fascist movements: violence is always just a thin-scratch layer under the surface. Now it appears that billionaires including Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong have been intimidated by Trump (or are desperately sucking up to him) and so are preventing their newspapers from making an endorsement in this year’s presidential race. (I just canceled my Washington Post subscription.) It took Adolf Hitler less than three months to cow and then largely shut down the media in Germany after he acquired power in January, 1933, although most newspapers had surrendered to him before then and voluntarily stopped reporting negative stories. Reporters were interred in Dachau as early as March of that same year, along with progressive politicians and editorial writers who’d dared criticize him in the past. Trump and his people trying to revisit this history is not the sign of a healthy republic; this is a bright red flashing warning about a country sliding into autocracy, as I described in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Now that the MAGA movement has become a full-blown fascist movement, the question is: What will the GOP do with it after the election? Particularly if Trump loses? You can leave your comments here.

— Rightwing billionaire Elon Musk and his colleagues apparently believe they now have the Supreme Court votes necessary to overturn the 1935 Wagner Act that legalized labor unions. When Musk “interviewed” Trump on Xitter, the two joked about how impressed Trump was with Musk’s unwillingness to allow unions in any of his companies. “I love it,” Trump told his fellow oligarch. “You’re the greatest ... I mean, I look at what you do. You just walk in and you just say, ‘You wanna quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone ... Every one of you is gone.’” Musk chuckled at that one, so Trump followed up by discussing putting Musk in charge of a government “efficiency” body that could lead the charge to bust the last of America’s unions among government workers: “You are the greatest! You would be very good [on the proposed commission]. Oh, you would love it.” Musk has filed a lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board (which enforces unions’ right to exist) claiming the entire agency is unconstitutional; a Trumpy federal judge has already agreed, temporarily blocking the agency’s ability to enforce the law, as the case now heads toward the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. Republicans and the billionaires who own them have been on a jeremiad against the ability of unions to exist ever since American workers first earned the right to organize in 1935. Will Musk and his Republican buddies succeed in finally gutting the last income protection the middle class has against greedy billionaires? Stay tuned.

— Republican attorneys general go to court to demand more pregnant 15-year-olds. This story sounds too bizarre to be true, but Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador have filed a lawsuit in federal court — presumably aiming for an eventual hearing before the Supreme Court — claiming that their states are being harmed, population-wise, by the availability of abortion drugs that can be shipped into their states by mail. They want shipping Mifepristone outlawed nationwide. The proof of the harm, they say, is that they are not seeing enough pregnant teenagers. The lawsuit is explicit (page 190): “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself. … When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly ‘do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,’ even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that ‘women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.’” They then claim that this “proof” that availability of mailed abortion pills are causing the drop in pregnancies among girls 15-19 years old is an “injury” to their states because it lowers their potential population. This is getting wild, but wait until the Supreme Court authorizes Red states to begin monitoring the menstrual periods of fertile girls and women; Alabama Republican Senator Katie Britt has already introduced federal legislation requiring companies selling devices that track ovulation to report their results to state agencies or a federal database, including police agencies nationwide, so pregnancies can be caught and tracked. Republicans won’t be happy until every girl in America grows up the way Amy Coney Barrett did in her People of Praise Catholic cult where she was referred to as a “Handmaiden.”

— And now, to the delight of Republican lawmakers and police the US government has bought a tool that can track you by your cellphone to abortion clinics anywhere in the country. Locate X is a product from Babel Street which our government has been using since the Trump administration; it’s capable of tracking every cellphone in the country with remarkable location accuracy. The folks at 404 Media did a trial run of it focused on tracking people to and from abortion clinics, and the process was startlingly easy. When Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and the rest of the GOP forced-birth crowd again gain control of the federal government, get ready. They’re chomping at the bit…

— Crazy Alert! Can anything get weirder than this? Tucker Carlson’s creepy “daddy speech” is stunning. Goddess only knows what happened to frozen-fish-stick heir Tucker Swanson Carlson in his childhood, but whatever it was, it’s showing. Earlier this week he introduced Trump at a rally with a sweet little speech about the former president’s future role overseeing our country and “spanking” all those uppity girls and women who’ve dared defy the Republican Party’s demand for more pregnancies and less talkback: “There has to be a point at which dad comes home. Yeah, that’s right, dad comes home and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed! He’s not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be. And when dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you, not it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.’” Honest, that’s what he said. And the crowd’s response wasn’t the shocked silence a rational person would expect; instead, when Trump appeared after this introduction, they started chanting, “Daddy’s here! Daddy’s here!” Where do they find these people? And how can anybody vote to put them in charge of our country?

— Even Crazier Alert! Famous MAGA pastor says American women are “pigs with gold nose rings,” wants to overturn the 19th Amendment right of women to vote, and says women who accuse men of rape but can’t absolutely prove it should be put to death. Say what?! Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon is a rising star in the GOP, and recently had some interesting things to say about American women. First, he claimed they’re far too pampered: “Pigs with gold nose rings.” Then he claimed it’s time to overturn the 19th Amendment and revoke women’s right to vote because that’s “the Christian thing to do.” Finally, to top it all off, the GOP’s top Christian guru argued women who claim rape but can’t prove it should be publicly executed to put an end to the Me Too movement. “If you perjure yourself by bearing false witness accusing somebody else,” the minister told his followers, “whatever the penalty would have been for that person had they been found guilty, then that penalty should fall on your head for falsely accusing them. … If that were to occur and the just penalties were to be enforced, you, the false accuser, is now put to death. And that’s a public death. It’s a public sentence, publicly carried out, then the citizens of these United States of America, you know what they would do? #MeToo would end real fast. False accusing, playing the victim when you’re actually not; you know how to end that real fast? All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied.” This guy isn’t an outlier; this is the direction the entire GOP has been going for years, and now, with Trump and Vance within a hair’s breadth of seizing the federal government, they feel empowered to be open and public about their positions. What would Jesus say? Nothing like Joel Webbon’s spouting off, I can guarantee you that…