Thom Hartmann

Thomas Carl Hartmann is an American radio personality, author, businessman, and progressive political commentator.

This dark history uncovers the roots of Trump's racist paramilitary police

ICE thugs dragged a Minnesota woman out of her car and assaulted her, stopping only when local police showed up, leaving her with cuts and bruises from being dragged on the ground. Her “crime” was following and tracking Trump’s violent, racist, masked federal modern-day Klan goons.

Joe Scarborough expressed the shock and outrage of most Americans, when he said:

“This is so out of control, and it looks like a paramilitary force from the third world! And so [the] police chief — not Antifa, Republicans, not Antifa, liars on the right — she calls the police to ask for help in America from paramilitary-type officers. It’s disgusting!”

What Scarborough and most Americans probably don’t know — particularly since Ronald Reagan gutted civics education — is that this is nothing new for America.

Between the 1830s and the 1860s the American South ceased to be a democracy altogether, more closely resembling a Nazi-style race-based fascist oligarchy.

Thus, Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy — something factions within the GOP have demanded for years — dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media.

They’re not so much expressing nostalgia for Dixie as much as they’re engaging in a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was neofascist oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled the politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead. Even white people who spoke up against the system risked losing their lives.

That same racist, fascist goal animates today’s GOP politicians, who fight tooth and nail to defend the interests of white men, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden.

Government subsidies in the hundreds of billions now flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that refuse to go along with Trump and his lickspittles are punished both by the withdrawal of federal support and the brutal attacks on their people by armed, masked ICE punks.

And, it appears, they’re rehearsing now to use those same terror tactics this November to intimidate voters of color in the relatively small handful of states and congressional districts where control of the House and Senate will be decided this fall.

They don’t need to attack or control the entire country; half a dozen cities, or maybe a dozen, and they will definitely keep control of the Senate and probably the House.

It looks like Black Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, a crucial state for Democrats, are next on their list.

Both Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) can see this coming, with Warner saying:

“I’m deeply concerned about the potential for Trump to send ICE agents to polling places to intimidate voters in this year’s elections.”

For years, white supremacist groups have worked to infiltrate and evangelize within our military and police departments; now, thanks to Trump, Miller, and congressional Republicans there’s an entire federal agency — with a massive budget — devoted exclusively to their beloved racial enforcement.

They’re so into using the racial profiling Brett Kavanaugh legalized with his so-called “Kavanaugh stops” that (Minneapolis-area suburb) Brooklyn Park’s Police Chief Mark Bruley publicly said that several off-duty police officers from local departments — every single one a person of color — have been stopped by ICE agents even though they were U.S. citizens and not suspected of any immigration violation.

One reported incident involved an off-duty dark-skinned Brooklyn Park officer who was “boxed in” by federal agents, had agents draw weapons and demand “paperwork” proving her citizenship, and had her phone knocked out of her hand when she attempted to record the encounter. Once she identified herself as a police officer, the agents immediately left without apology, Bruley said.

The chief said multiple local officers have had similar experiences, including two from the St. Paul Police Department who said they were pulled over in situations that seemed outside legal authority for immigration agents, and one who was pulled over on two different occasions for driving while brown. All were people of color.

These actions resemble the old Slave Patrols that terrorized both Black people in the South and abolitionists in that region (mostly poor, working-class white men, many unemployed) who argued for an end to slavery (and its free labor competition).

In the old South — like in American cities today occupied by ICE — opposing the oligarchs and their one-party segregationist regime was treated as a threat. If you spoke up for labor rights, racial justice, or democratic reforms, your name was put on informal but very real blacklists that circulated among police, employers, banks, and political bosses.

Enforced by White Citizens Councils and the masked, deputized agents of the Klan — that era’s version of ICE — that meant you’d experience harassment, bogus arrests, firings, evictions, and sometimes even execution. Dissent wasn’t just frowned on in the Confederate South: it was systematically tracked and punished.

This wasn’t some kind of random bigotry. It was a coordinated public-private system of control where business elites, politicians, and law enforcement worked hand-in-glove to intimidate anybody who dared challenge their power.

Police routinely stopped “known troublemakers,” arrested activists on phony charges, and looked the other way when intimidation or violence against the activists erupted.

Terror and even death were always waiting in the wings if someone didn’t get the message.

The result was a regional police state in all but name: one-party rule, oligarchic power, racial caste enforcement, political surveillance, and intimidation as daily governance.

Even after the Civil War, in the Jim Crow South, challenging this racialized fascist system didn’t just make you unpopular; it put you on a list. And once you were on it, the machinery of repression could crush you anytime they chose.

From Stephen Miller’s rhetoric to Pete Hegseth’s purge of dark-skinned officers to Kristi Noem strutting for the camera in front of El Salvadoran prisoners, the racism and naked authoritarianism of the Trump regime is the cornerstone of their support by their racist, white supremacist MAGA base.

To his base’s delight, Trump is deleting the stories of Black heroes from our museums and cemeteries, restoring the names of slave-owning Confederate generals to our military bases, and bringing back their statues. Outside of a few tokens, his administration is almost entirely all-white with 13 white billionaires in his cabinet.

Today’s Republican Party — something Dwight Eisenhower would recognize as what he fought against in Europe — is based on and sustained by racism, male supremacy, cheap labor, corporate cronyism, propaganda, a devotion to a mythic white past, immunity for powerful white men, a race-based form of religious fundamentalism, dynastic families, the censorship of schools and libraries, isolationism, violent policing of people of color, and the embrace of foreign dictatorships.

In every one of those, it’s a virtual clone of the Confederacy with the exception of explicit chattel slavery, although legal slavery is enthusiastically practiced in the prisons of most Red states under the rubric of the 13th Amendment, which legalizes slavery against a person convicted of a crime.

As we see red states eagerly embracing gerrymandering and voter suppression, the danger is not simply that Trump may rig an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws.

The real danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and funded and refined by generations of American oligarchs (particularly since the Brown v Board SCOTUS decision roused Fred Koch to fund the John Birch Society and their “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards), is becoming normalized across Republican-controlled states and increasingly in the federal government.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their billionaire and GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better or freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked, enjoying Cognac and a cigar (and the occasional underage girl) in an exclusive men’s-only club.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be.

America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

Hopefully, these rightwingers won’t force us into a second civil war, won’t start a foreign war, and their motion toward full-on fascism can be stopped this fall at the ballot box. If not, America is in for a world of hurt.

Double-check your voter registration, wake up your friends and neighbors, and show up on March 28th for the next No Kings Day. See you there!

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Staggering evidence trove shows who put Trump in the White House — and controls him still

The British newspaper Daily Mail is out with a deeply researched investigative report, the result of a long collaboration between columnists Glen Owen and Dan Hodges, along with Mark Hookham (Assistant Editor Investigations), and Daisy Graham-Brown (Investigative Reporter).

It’s shocking in its detail and its implication that Vladimir Putin has basically owned Donald Trump for years, even before Trump ran for president in 2016.

They note of last week’s partial (about 50 percent) Epstein document release:

“The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow. [Jeffrey] Epstein even seems to have secured audiences with Putin after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.”

Essentially, they’re arguing that Epstein was running an operation on behalf of the KGB/Putin that lured wealthy and powerful men to Epstein’s New York and Palm Beach mansions and his island where they were surreptitiously filmed having sex with underage girls.

That material was then presumably passed along to Putin, who used it for leverage when he needed it:

“Intelligence sources believe Epstein was running ‘the world’s largest honeytrap operation’ on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates.”

In return for giving Putin videos of wealthy, famous men in criminally compromising positions, Putin reportedly arranged for massive amounts of corrupt Russian money to be handed to Epstein to launder in the US.

Such money typically comes from illicit drug and oil deals, outright theft, sanctions evasions, and Russian organized crime oligarchs (including Putin and his associates) and is frequently laundered in this country using real estate. It’s the Mafia’s favorite, too.

America has the most lax and largely useless real estate transaction laws in the developed world, so a main way to launder such dirty cash is through cash-based real estate transactions (which are illegal in almost every other developed country).

And we know that Trump and his sons, when US and European banks refused to loan him any more money after his multiple bankruptcies, started taking in enough money to ensure the survival of his little real estate empire and it was all coming from Russia.

As Don Jr. told wealthy attendees to a 2008 real-estate conference:

“In terms of high-end product influx into the U.S., Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

Similarly, Eric Trump told a friend, who later testified about it:

“‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’”

This is one of the reasons Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee (that oversees US banking) has been demanding access to Epstein’s finances and even introduced legislation (the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act) to require that disclosure, which Republicans are currently blocking.

That alone is worth a call to your two US senators.

The documents released last week included a series of email conversations between Epstein and senior European officials close to Putin. This is way beyond Gary Hart and Monkey Business; this is the President of the United States being in the pocket of a foreign power and profiting from it. They pretty much openly suggest Epstein knew about ways to “handle” Trump:

“Other messages revealed Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Mr Trump ahead of a summit with Putin in Helsinki. …

“In a June 2018 exchange, Epstein indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, ‘understood Trump after our conversations.’ …

“Earlier that month Epstein had also messaged Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, to tell him Mr Jagland was due to meet Putin and Lavrov and was then staying overnight with him at his mansion in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Epstein, of course, died under deeply suspicious circumstances in jail while Trump was president (and now Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a country club type of facility where she reportedly spends the days training puppies). As Republican consultant Harlan Hill noted on Twitter at the time of Epstein’s supposed suicide:

“Dead men tell no tales. Just as Jeffrey Epstein starts to name names, he decides to kill himself? Mkay. Totally believable.”

So, if Epstein had given Putin video of Trump having sex with underage girls, and Trump knows it and has for decades, how might that have changed Trump’s behavior?

Might it provoke him to hang a photo of Putin in the White House?
Or go along with Putin’s daily slaughter of Ukrainian children?
Give Putin’s top diplomat information that burned a spy and an anti-Russia operation?
Tell the world that he trusts Putin over the US intelligence services?
Put a Putin-friendly conspiracy fan in charge of all US intelligence?
Severely damage NATO, a perpetual thorn in Putin’s side?
Shatter our alliances with the EU and other democratic nations in ways that may well last for generations?
Refuse to make America’s dues payments to the UN, causing that body to have to shut down, perhaps permanently, this summer?
Steal US intelligence secrets, including top-secret nuclear information, and put it in a place where Russian spies or their associates can easily access and photocopy it?
Unleash ICE in a way that turns Americans against each other leading to the “Second US Civil War” that Russian media and Putin’s #2 man (Medvedev) have been gleefully predicting?
Gut America’s soft power around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands mostly children, in the Third World while opening opportunities for Putin and Xi to pick them up as new alliances?

In 2019 The Washington Post revealed that, throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump was having secret phone conversations with Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including one just days before the 2020 election).

The Moscow Project from the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team, as well as at least 38 known meetings, all just leading up to the 2016 election.

The manager of his 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 — has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf.

Throughout the campaign, he regularly let Russia know where Trump needed specific types of help, and how, and when.

With that help, an army of bots, shills, and trolls were unleashed on social media to successfully swing the young white male vote toward Trump.

Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia and his unpaid efforts to elect Trump.

As The New York Times noted in 2020:

“[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”

There is no known parallel to this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and criminally bringing stolen top secret documents to Mar-a-Lago is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Washington Post reported that Trump had a habit of carrying top-secret information that could severely damage our national security, leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations.

Was he bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin told him to?

Trump doesn’t put all that effort into hauling things around unless he’s terrified.

“Boxes of documents even came with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign adversaries of the United States.”

When Robert Mueller’s team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing sensitive military information with Putin, they were stonewalled.

The Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump 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 Flynn’s dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

As the Mueller Report noted:

“The President launched public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.

“For instance, the President attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who declined to cooperate with the government.”

It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes:

“These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they believed they made happen.

And apparently Putin and his intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November, 2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.

In his first months in office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn” that spy.

The undercover agent was apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into rubble (creating a brown-skinned refugee crisis in Europe, which both Putin and Orbán exploited).

That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him over to Putin.

As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later):

“The source was considered the highest level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official.

“According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”

The CIA concluded that the risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s presidency, 2017.

Similarly, when they met in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator (Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.

The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post:

“There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”

Three weeks after Trump’s July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.

Paul has also consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for the repeal of the Espionage Act, which Jack Smith was prepared to charge Trump under. Paul further suggested the FBI may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was worried because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:

“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally burned a man working for the FBI — whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:

“[C]urrent and former officials said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”

Things were picking up the following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while Trump was preparing for the 2020 election.

In July 2019, Trump had conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.

In one of those conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national security scramble across multiple agencies.

As The Washington Post noted in an article titled “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”:

“Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”

On the last day of that month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin.

The White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car…

But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”

Perhaps just by coincidence, months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:

“Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

“The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.”

In the years since, Trump continues to maintain a close relationship with Putin; most recently he revealed that he’d asked “a favor” of the Russian dictator to “pause” his murderous, war-crime bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine “for one week.” Putin, being in the power position, chose to laugh at Trump and continued his assault on the nation, although he did throw Trump a bone by pausing his hits on Kiev for a few days.

These aren’t just “a few bad judgment calls” or a president with “strange foreign policy instincts.” These stories (and literally hundreds of others) point to a man who’s behaved, consistently and predictably, like someone under leverage, someone whose personal fear of exposure of some sort of major crime — like the ones we know Epstein was holding over other billionaires — outweighs his loyalty to the nation he swore to serve.

If Americans don’t demand real investigations, genuine accountability, and impeachment and jail time for what sure looks like the greatest counterintelligence failure in our history, we may lose what’s left of our democracy before the 2028 elections can fix things.

If Democrats can take control of either branch of Congress and if Schumer and Jeffries get spine transplants and begin a serious investigation into Trump’s destruction of the United States and our historic role in the world, they’ll have enough to keep them busy for years.

This is not about politics or personality. It’s about whether a country can survive being led by someone who looks captured and compromised by a foreign power. If even half of this is true, then staying quiet is the same as going along with it.

We must demand real investigations and real consequences, or accept that the presidency can be bought, blackmailed, and used against the country itself.

Let your elected officials know your thoughts on this, and don’t forget to demand your elected Republicans step up and defend America, too. You can reach your member of Congress and both your Senators via the congressional switchboard at: (202) 224-3121.

See you in the streets on March 28th!

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

The scream heard around the world: Trump's cruelty has a new face

A five year old child — Liam Conejo Ramos — was taken from his home and sent hundreds of miles away to a detention facility, or for-profit concentration camp, in Texas. He was never accused of a crime, didn’t cross our southern border alone, and is so young he barely understands what’s happening to him. Odds are he has no understanding of why he’s being treated with such brutality.

Nobody told little Liam about Tom Homan and Stephen Miller being so eager to punish brown-skinned immigrants, delighting in their pain, rationalizing it as a “deterrent” to “illegal immigration” that’s “poisoning the blood” of white America, as Donald Trump himself pointed out on the election trail.

Liam is confined to a cell in a cold, concrete facility where the lights are kept on day and night.

There’s no school for him to attend, nobody to hold him and reassure him, his medical care limited, and the food is so bad he’s struggled to keep it down.

His lawyer says his health has declined while in government custody.

But this isn’t really about immigration; it’s about power. And how stories and language facilitate the exercise or restraint of that power. It’s about what happens when a nation starts talking about its own people (and the people seeking refuge here) as if they’re enemies in a war.

As Radley Balko noted on BlueSky:

“I’m coming to Boston and I’m bringing hell with me.” — Tom Homan in February

”Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely.” — Tom Homan in March

”I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room…” — Tom Homan in July, referring to a Democratic congressman who’d offended him.

This week, during a press briefing, Homan again used the language of war to describe immigration enforcement against brown-skinned people, and resistance from blue states. Words like “fight,” “battle,” “theater,” and “invasion.” When asked how many of his masked goons were still in Minneapolis, he said:

“3,000. There’s been some rotations. Another thing I witnessed when I came here, I’ll share this with you, I’ve met a lot of people, they’ve been in theater, some of them have been in theater for eight months. So there’s going to be rotations of personnel.” [emphasis added]

“In theater”?!? That’s how Gen. Eisenhower used to talk about taking on the Nazis in Europe. That’s not how law enforcement talks; it’s how invading armies speak of invading the territory of their enemies.

That’s no accident by Homan, nor is it the mere use of “colorful phrasing.” When he uses that kind of language, he does it explicitly as a political weapon. And history tells us exactly where that leads.

Richard Nixon taught us this lesson when he declared a “war on drugs” and then used it to spy on and persecute antiwar and civil rights leaders: the language of warfare changes the moral rules.

Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In war, suffering is normal. In war, collateral damage is unfortunate but socially acceptable. In war, the people caught in the middle stop being human beings with rights and start being obstacles to be managed, broken, or, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed.

Five-year-old Liam, one of hundreds of children Trump and Homan have shipped off to Texas, is now living inside the consequences of that shift in language, that “war” rhetorical frame.

This is absolutely unnecessary.

The United States has laws for immigration enforcement. We have courts, due process and longstanding legal standards for the treatment of children in government custody.

I recently wrote about a friend who was deported during Barack Obama’s administration by ICE agents in windbreakers with badges and ID, who politely gave him a month to get his affairs in order. Obama actually deported more people than Trump in any given year, including 2025, and nobody had their window smashed in or took 10 bullets in the back.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since 1924 when the Border Patrol was created, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.

By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.

After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is more about the skin color of the deportees than about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

None of those systems require keeping children locked in facilities where the lights never go off. None of them requires denying a child a hug or an education. None of them require the conditions that lawyers and doctors have repeatedly warned cause physical and psychological harm to both children and adults but that Miller, Homan, Trump, et al insist on using.

The conditions of this child’s confinement aren’t a bureaucratic accident; they’re the predictable result of a system designed around the use of violence, isolation, terror, and pain directed at people with nonwhite skin as a brutal way of enforcing “deterrence” to Make America White Again.

A system designed to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to private prison operators on the assumption they’ll recycle a good chunk of that back as campaign contributions and “gifts” to Republican politicians.

For years now, Republicans and rightwing media figures have described immigrants as if they’re part of an invasion. A “flood,” or a “threat” to be repelled. When leaders and the press talk about human beings that way, people find it easier to treat them as less than human. It becomes easier to cut corners, ignore the suffering, and to look away when a child gets sick or even dies behind locked doors.

And — like Nixon’s war on drugs — it doesn’t stop with migrants.

Trump’s war on immigrants is as phony as was Nixon’s War on Drugs. Blacks are again the victims, but now instead of the young white men and women who took LBJ and Nixon down, he chose brown-skinned children. This is a sickness.

When that same war language is turned against Blue states, states that disagree with grandstanding politicians and brutal, inhumane agendas, something even more dangerous happens. Political disagreement becomes treason. Federalism becomes defiance. And America itself starts to look like a battlefield.

If we accept that it’s normal to treat migrant children this way because we’re at war during an invasion, what else becomes acceptable? What happens the next time a governor refuses to comply with a federal directive? What happens the next time protesters take to the streets, or a reporter chronicles a demonstration? Who gets labeled the enemy then?

This is not hypothetical. We don’t even have to reach back to the 1930s in Europe; we’ve seen this movie before right here in America.

The “war on drugs” gave us mass incarceration and militarized police. The “war on terror” gave us torture, secret prisons, and ongoing surveillance.

Every time we let wartime language redefine our domestic policy debates, the result is the same. Rights shrink, power concentrates, and dissidents, members of the media, and the most vulnerable alike pay the price.

Children are supposed to be the line we never cross: they’re the moral stress test of any society. If a system refuses to protect its children, it isn’t a system worth defending.

Little Liam locked up in that Texas facility behind concrete and razor wire is not a symbol: he’s a child who should be in school. Who should be sleeping in his own bed at home, tucked in by a loving parent. Who should be held by people who see him as a human being, not a person with brown skin to be exploited to satisfy the racist blood-lust of the MAGA base.

Supporters of these policies will say that enforcement is necessary. That the private, for-profit facilities they use meet legal standards. That Homan’s rhetoric is just “tough talk.”

But it’s all bulls--t: enforcement doesn’t require cruelty. Following the law doesn’t require dehumanization. And words are never just words when they come from people with power.

Language shapes policy. Policy shapes systems. Systems shape societies.

That’s the through line from Homan’s bizarre press briefing filled with war talk to a small child lying awake hungry, shivering, and crying under fluorescent lights.

A nation that truly believes in liberty and justice doesn’t have to declare war on children to enforce its laws. It doesn’t need to turn sovereign states into enemies in order to govern effectively, or imprison reporters for doing their jobs. And it doesn’t need to abandon its humanity to keep its citizens safe.

The question this regime confronts us with isn’t one of how to enforce or not enforce immigration law; it’s what kind of society we’re willing to become in the process.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Here's how Trump is tipping the world into economic chaos

America’s economic system has never been fair or perfect but for more than a century it rested on basic guardrails that kept instability in check and allowed us to fight for progress and win. Those guardrails are now being stripped away by policies that favor wealth and power over accountability and long-term stability.

For over a hundred years, the United States has been the cornerstone of international economic stability. The independence of our central bank (the “Fed”) has been a part of it, as has the strength of the dollar, which comes about in large part because the rest of the world relies on our currency as the default for international trade.

And now Donald Trump and the GOP are threatening it all.

Trump has added $2 trillion to our national debt in the past 12 months, and he’s on course to do it again (or worse) this year. While our entire GDP — the entirety of all goods and services produced in America every year — is roughly $31.1 trillion, our national debt stands at $38.4 trillion.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell pointed out on Wednesday:

“Right now we’re running a very large deficit at essentially full employment and so the fiscal picture needs to be addressed, and it’s not really being addressed,” adding, “the path is unsustainable and the sooner we work on it, the better.”

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, our national debt was less than $1 trillion, because every president from FDR to Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon to Ford to Carter had worked to pay down the roughly 140 percent of GDP debt we ran up fighting World War II.

Across those same presidencies, America had also built a broad and strong social safety net for its citizens, primarily through the New Deal and Great Society programs. And Republicans hated it all, particularly because it’d been paid for with a 74 percent to 91 percent income tax on billionaires and a 50 percent income tax on corporate profits.

They were desperate to find a way to force Democrats to gut their own “Santa” social welfare programs, so, Republicans reasoned, if they just cut taxes on rich people and then ran the debt up hard and fast enough it would freak out Democrats and force them to dial back social spending.

They called it their “Two Santas” strategy, which I detail here, and over the course of the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and two illegal wars, four Republican presidents managed to add over $37 trillion to our national debt.

The grimmest consequence of this is that we’re spending $1.2 trillion every year on interest payments on our national debt. That’s money that could otherwise have gone to create a national healthcare system, provide free college education, or help people buy their first homes but, instead, is going to payments to wealthy investors here and abroad who hold US Treasuries.

Up until recently, we were able to pull this off because the US Dollar has been the world’s reserve currency for the better part of a century. All sorts of international transactions (especially oil) are denominated in dollars, so there’s a huge worldwide demand for our currency because you can’t trade without them; that keeps the dollar’s value strong and lets us borrow at what would otherwise be absurdly low rates.

That, in turn, is essentially a subsidy for Americans of all stripes: lower mortgage rates, lower car loan rates, easier credit, and US-based companies can more easily finance growth and new product development.

It also gives our government more power on the international stage because we control the dollars everybody must use, so we can exploit that leverage to seize other countries’ dollar-denominated assets, enforce embargos, and freeze economic activity.

But twice in the past twelve months the value of the dollar has taken a huge hit, in both cases because the world freaked out at Trump’s insanity and started to sell dollars.

The first was in April of last year (a 6 percent drop in value) when Trump announced his bizarre worldwide tariffs; the second was last week when he went to Davos and blithered through a semi-coherent speech that left international leaders wondering about his sanity, his judgement, and his reliability. And, by inference, the judgment and reliability of the United States itself.

Trump’s own economic illiteracy and impulse-driven tariff policies, in other words, have damaged the value of our currency and may have put the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency at risk.

The most visible consequence of this collapse in the dollar’s value are spikes in the prices of gold (now over $5,000/ounce, up from $1,077 in 2015) and silver, and how much more expensive foreign travel has become. Three years ago, the euro was at parity with the dollar (one dollar buys one euro), but today a dollar only buys €0.84 (84 cents).

As the dollar drops in value, that’s ultimately reflected in everything imported becoming more expensive (which drives inflation), although it does help companies that export things as it makes their goods and services cheaper.

The big impact, though, could come if international investors and other countries conclude it’s unlikely that the US will be able to repay our debts.

Ever since the Bush Crash of 2008 revealed how deregulation had corrupted our banking system, foreign investors holdings of US debt have steadily declined.

For the rest of the world to have “full faith and confidence” in the US and our currency, they must be convinced we operate with economic transparency and consistently abide by the rule of law.

Trump’s willy-nilly tariffs, often used to extort other nations into giving his family a new hotel or golf course, his constant lies on the international stage about everything from renewable energy to our “right” to invade a foreign country and capture its leader, to his killing fishermen off the coast of Venezuela and his current threats against Iran, all argue against trusting us.

Trump’s already destroyed our soft power by gutting USAID, ruined our relationships with our allies by embracing Putin and trash-talking NATO and the EU, and now is shaking the confidence of our remaining democratic allies by imposing police-state tactics on Blue cities.

The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries are on the move, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the UAE having joined recently in an agreement to use their alternative currencies instead of dollars. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) is now also challenging our SWIFT system, and South Africa and Brazil are the most recent countries to integrate it into their own financial systems. They’re using the real and the yuan to trade things like soybeans, going entirely around the dollar.

India and the UAE are now trading in rupees and the dirham, and China is using yuan to buy natural gas from the UAE. China has almost entirely abandoned the dollar for their trade with Russia, the UAE, and Iran. Like South Africa, Brazil has increasingly been using the real and the yuan to settle bilateral trade with China, bypassing the US dollar.

Thus, in recent years, alternatives to the greenback are gaining traction. Even Trump’s good buddy Javier Milei in Argentina is now trading with China in yuan instead of dollars.

We still have enormous momentum and a collapse of the dollar or the international system based on it is unlikely to happen in the near term, but if Trump continues to badger our Federal Reserve or appoints a toady to its chair, and continues with his erratic, illegal, and unconstitutional behavior here and abroad, there’s a good chance that a concerted international effort to de-dollarize will pick up even more steam than it already has.

Economic collapse isn’t inevitable, but it becomes more likely when demagogues choose inequality, debt, and instability over responsibility and shared prosperity.

Whether this era is remembered as a turning point or just a warning from our Fed chief will depend on whether we ignore those choices Republicans have made for 45 years, or if we finally confront and reverse them.

Hang on, keep your eyes open, and follow these trends. Forewarned is forearmed.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Don't be fooled: this Trump move shows we're still on the path to dictatorship

Over on Threads, sierracascadia posted:

“CNN BREAKING: Kristin Holmes reports Stephen Miller is saying ‘there may have been a breach of protocol’ and Noem is blabbering about how she was in touch with Trump and Miller for her talking points. Miller is saying that he got his information CBP trying to shove it down to Bovino! This f---ing clown show guys. They are all going down.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are celebrating the replacement overseeing the Minneapolis ICE onslaught of Nazi-cosplayer Greg Bovino and eager puppy-killer and adulterer Kristi Noem with Tom Homan, who merely takes $50,000 bribes in burger bags and is therefore presumably more reasonable. Blue collar versus white collar, and all that.

But, wait a minute. Slow down. It’s way too premature to toast the dawn of a new era.

Fascist governments don’t rise in one giant arc, nor do they collapse that way. It’s more of what electrical engineers and ham radio operators would call a “sawtooth pattern.” Climb an inch up toward fascism, get pushback from the public so you back down a half-inch until things quiet down, then move up another inch in another step toward the ultimate goal of total tyranny.

Learn from your own mistakes, while getting the public used to each step, so Trump and his lickspittles can move onto the next falling domino in the process of ending democracy and replacing it with strongman oligarchic autocracy.

Step-by-step, the fascist leadership gets there. As has happened so often in other countries across history.

In other words, ICE is still operating on the assumption of complete immunity, still kicking in doors without Fourth Amendment warrants, still capable of killing you or me without ever answering for it. And they know it.

We are still on the path to dictatorship.

Eventually, people in countries that are in the process of flipping from democracy to fascism figure out that they’re now living in a dictatorship; by then, however, it’s usually too late.

For people in Hungary, it was May, 2020 when Viktor Orbán started arresting people for their Facebook posts. For folks in Russia, it was December, 2011 when Alexi Navalny and his supporters were first assaulted in public and then arrested and sent to brutal gulags in Siberia. For Germans, it was July 14, 1933 — six months after he became chancellor — when Adolf Hitler outlawed all political parties except his own.

But at first, the steps from democracy to fascism and tyranny always seems like “just another thing the government has to do to deal with a very real problem.” Something that reasonable people would understand and can’t reasonably object to. Something that, even if weird, makes a certain amount of sense.

After all, we do have millions of people in this country without documentation….

Until suddenly the mask is dropped and the twisted face of hateful fascism peers out at the country with laser-red eyes and a bloody mouth filled with threats and lies. Wearing camouflage, anonymous, face masked, carrying handcuffs and pepper spray while brandishing a gun.

Today, Trump appears to be backing away from his senior toadies who’re still blaming Nicole Good and Alex Pretti for their own executions, and both Democrats and the media are proclaiming Bovino’s departure as a “victory for democracy.”

It’s no such thing.

This is a recalibration. Trump, like Orbán and Vladimir Putin before him, is learning just how far he can go before he or his people encounter resistance they can’t bludgeon their way through.

They’re figuring out which messages will work to get us to accept the changes they’re making to America and our political and economic systems, including how much they can steal for themselves and their families, and which schemes won’t work out for them.

This is an old playbook that dates back to Machiavelli and before. It’s how every dictator ends up fabulously rich while wielding life-or-death power.

Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very “banality” and “ordinariness” of such evil is its greatest weapon.

Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:

“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence ... and yet still hours of pleasure ... and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”

Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it).

“To resist seemed pointless;” he wrote of himself, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”

And Milton Mayer, in 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.

“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.”

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 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.”

Sound familiar?

Consider Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial:

“Well, the Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion.”

That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Can you imagine if Barack Obama had asserted such a power? Now it’s barely a blip.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should have set off alarm bells. Instead, it got the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay…and eventually acceptance with barely a follow-up peep from the media.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicled in The New York Times:

“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.

“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.”

Congressional Democrats, thinking they’re winning the PR war (and not realizing this is a battle within that war, not the war itself) are suggesting they’ll only vote to fund DHS/ICE this week to avoid a government shutdown under the following conditions, as Reuters reports:

“Democrats are seeking: a prohibition on ICE detentions or deportations of American citizens; a ban on masks worn by ICE agents; a requirement to wear body cameras; explicit prohibitions on excessive use of force; prohibitions on raids of churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship, as well as hospitals and schools; and no absolute immunity from prosecution of agents violating codes of conduct.”

It’s a reasonable list, if ICE were a legitimate institution worth preserving. And, of course, we do need somebody to enforce our immigration laws.

But this agency has become so corrupt, has developed such a toxic culture, and has hired so many outright dangerous former felons and open racists, that it must be shut down and replaced.

And what about arresting and prosecuting the people who committed the murders that we know about? And investigating the ones we’ve only heard rumors of?

And letting that prosecution go right up the chain of command all the way to the top, like it did during Watergate, when the Attorney General of the United States went to prison for years?

Why aren’t Democrats talking like that? You know, if the shoe was on the other foot, Republicans would be.

Even if Republicans were to accept all these reforms — and odds are they won’t — we’d still be on the same path toward fascism. It would just look more orderly and lawful, and we’d breathe a sigh of relief, not realizing we’d just helped the Trump regime with their latest readaptation.

When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.

But there is a path forward.

The antidote to normalization is outrage and resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.

Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said:

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”

We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.

That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin” and attacks Somalis like Representative Ilhan Omar we don’t say “that’s just Trump being Trump”; we say, “That’s fascist rhetoric.”

When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize and demand an end to the entire rotten undertaking.

History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either.

This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us peacefully in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.

If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.

Don’t get used to fascism.

Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.

And demand that our Democratic leaders do the same.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump pushed us to the edge of disaster. It will soon be too late to step back

There is something deeply unsettling about Abraham Lincoln’s famous phrase “four score,” meaning 80 years. It’s roughly the length of a human life, but is also the interval at which the United States repeatedly collides with crisis and is forced to decide, again and again, what kind of nation we will be.

Historian Neil Howe explores this pattern in his book The Fourth Turning Is Here, arguing that every 80 years America reaches a sort of breaking point that ultimately hits on major issues like democracy or autocracy and oligarchy.

What typically triggers those moments, historians will tell you, is when inequality has grown extreme, political power has hardened into the hands of a few, and democratic norms have been eroded or even openly attacked. The country then is forced to choose: either expand freedom and rights, or slip toward authoritarian rule.

Nobody’s sure exactly why this keeps happening every 80 years. It may be because when the people who lived through the last catastrophe have just died off, their lived memory of repression and violence is gone with them. The guardrails then weaken, the warnings are forgotten, and people take leaps without remembering the lessons from the past.

Or it may simply be the way generations cycle through cultural and political power, producing recurring moments every eighty years when fear, grievance, and concentrated wealth overwhelm democratic restraint.

But it certainly appears to be real. Consider the history starting in the late 17th century as America became an important economic and strategic British colony:

The government’s heavily armed men walked the streets as enforcers of religious conformity, making sure people showed up at the “right” church. Attendance was compulsory, dissenters or non-Puritans were fined or harassed, and the power of the state marched in lockstep with the power of the pulpit. Then came the Glorious Revolution and the end of King James II’s reign, as colonial charters were rewritten, Protestant dissenters gained new legal rights, and the idea of religious freedom in British America caught fire (eventually to be enshrined in the First Amendment). It was 1690.
Eighty years later, the government’s heavily armed agents were roaming the streets looking for people who’d spoken out against King George III or his East India Company. If you defied them, they could imprison or even shoot you. The people, enraged, rose up, threw their tea in Boston harbor, and demanded self-governance and a political system that respected the rights of citizens. It was 1773.
Eighty years after the American Revolution, armed enforcers again stalked the streets, this time in the Confederate South. They hunted abolitionists, journalists, and people of color who dared challenge the brutal system of racial hierarchy and human bondage they ran. If you resisted, you could be beaten, hanged, or shot with impunity. Speech was crushed. Violence enforced obedience. Elections were rigged. The nation was driven into civil war to stop an explicitly authoritarian system that had seized control of half the country. It was the late 1850s.
Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, the government’s agents, heavily armed, were going door-to-door in communities across western states looking for people of color. Americans and immigrants of Japanese ancestry were immediately seized and put into concentration camps scattered around the country. It was 1942, just months after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Exactly eighty years after the end of World War II, Donald Trump sent his heavily armed agents into American communities on “Kavanaugh stop” missions to find people with dark skin or foreign accents, regardless of their refugee or legal status, and imprison them in privately-run for-profit concentration camps. In Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities people are rising up and fighting back when confronted with chemical weapons and armed thugs who believe they have what VP Vance called “absolute immunity” to kill American citizens.

Each of these moments forced Americans to make a choice.

In 1690, we chose religious freedom.
In 1770, we rejected having a king and embraced the creation of a government “by the consent of the governed.”
In 1860, we rejected the fascist system that had completely seized control of the Confederate states and we preserved democracy for the continent.
In 1943, we freed the 140,000+ Japanese immigrants and Japanese-ancestry Americans we’d imprisoned after Pearl Harbor and fought a war to reject Hitler and Tojo’s attempt at creating a worldwide fascist empire.
And here we are, eighty-one years after the end of WWII, once again facing an authoritarian crisis that’s forcing Americans to decide afresh who we are and what form of government we want.

Trump and his gang of lickspittles, toadies, and incompetent hangers-on are hell-bent on turning America into a Russia-like authoritarian state with single party rule. Almost without exception, they’ve cowed the entire Republican Party into a frightened silence as their Brownshirts spread across the country to terrorize any city whose citizens had the temerity to vote against them.

Outside of a few real stars including Walz, Pritzker, Frey, Ellison, and Newsom, Democrats — particularly national Democratic leadership — have failed to meet the moment.

Nine turncoat Democrats even voted last week to give ICE more money and power (Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Jared Golden of Maine; Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington; Don Davis of North Carolina; and Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, both of New York) and Hakeem Jeffries did nothing to punish them. None lost committee assignments or other perks. No one from Democratic leadership or from the DNC has meaningfully challenged the power or death-dealing of the Trump regime.

As a result, average Americans have picked up the slack, organizing ad hoc when ICE shows up, and showing up by the millions in the streets for No Kings and other protests.

Emperor Trump’s response has been brutal, murdering citizens in the streets and then defiantly lying about the circumstances while slandering the memories of those his goons killed. He’s questioned whether the election will even happen this fall and is now demanding voting rolls from every Blue state so, presumably, his people can figure out how to purge them of Democratic voters.

We are thus at a turning point, much as we were in the 1490 War of the Roses, the 1570 Armada Crisis, the 1690s Glorious Revolution, the 1770s American Revolution, the 1860s Civil War, the Republican Great Depression and World War II of 1929-1945, and today’s Trump Fascism Crisis.

Every one of these prior “great turnings” has produced an expansion of human rights, an improvement in quality of life and freedom, and, essentially, a rebooting of the country. We stand today on the verge of another turning point, every bit as important and consequential as the six that preceded it.

Will America choose Trump’s and Putin’s authoritarian model, compiling lists of “domestic terrorists” who dare film ICE operations, and killing people who dare drive away from them or try to protect people from being beaten to the ground and pepper-sprayed in the face?

Or will we constrain the jackbooted thugs who are currently running wild in our cities, stop the naked corruption of the Trump family that’s made billions in their first year back in charge, and help the GOP reinvent itself along the lines of Dwight Eisenhower’s moderate conservatism?

Neither outcome is guaranteed.

Trump and his degenerate suckups have no intention of relinquishing power, and billionaires like Murdoch, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Ellison appear committed to using their media and social media power to back him up. MAGA families are replacing their “Don’t Tread on Me” flags with ones that say, “Comply or Die” as submissive conservative men worship at the golden “Big Daddy Trump” altar.

But the flame of freedom also burns bright in the hearts of most average Americans and has for over 250 years. The heirs of MLK’s marches, the SDS resistance to Vietnam, and my father’s generation who put down Hitler like a dog continue to spark and inspire us.

A time of choosing is again upon us.

Will we stand with our ancestors and re-embrace democracy and reinvent America as a new and better nation with equal justice for all and a commitment to peace and human rights? Or will we become a MAGA version of Putin’s empire bent on war, conquest, and terror, egged on by rightwing billionaires and their media?

At the moment — but only at this moment — our fate is in our own hands. Now, we must choose.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

These Republican lies point to — and make worse — something dangerously rotten

Jack Smith’s testimony before Congress on Thursday was a master class at demonstrating how elected Republicans have become what psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck termed People of the Lie, in his 1986 bestseller. It was the perfect example for this week being the 16th anniversary of the corrupt Citizens United decision.

For most of American history, lying in politics carried a real and immediate cost. Get caught and you’d lose credibility, maybe get voted out of office, and sometimes — as with the roughly 40 people around Richard Nixon who went to prison — even face criminal consequences.

That informal but effective enforcement mechanism depended on a shared understanding that truth mattered and that the law applied equally to everyone. Five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court, however, shattered that understanding when they handed down Citizens United.

By redefining political bribery as “free speech,” Justices Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, and Scalia turned money into power without accountability and, in the process, turned lying into a currency that could be minted, traded, and hoarded by unscrupulous Republican politicians.

Once political power could be bought openly, the incentive structure in American politics changed. The goal of today’s GOP’s is no longer persuasion grounded in reality; instead, it’s morphed into a sophisticated system of lies and half-truths.

With social media amplification and backed up by a billionaire-owned rightwing media machine larger than any the world’s ever seen, the bigger the lie, the more emotionally gripping it is, and the faster and farther it’d travel, the more useful it became to Republicans. Lying stopped being a moral failing and became the foundation of their business and political model.

When a Republican politician can raise money, mobilize voters, intimidate opponents, or justify cruelty with a falsehood, that lie pays for itself with huge political, power, and even economic dividends. Truth, by contrast, became a liability as we saw Republican after Republican try to discredit or shut up Jack Smith, in the service of the Party’s 2020 “election fraud” lie.

The GOP has become so addicted to lies that its members can’t even say out loud the actual name of the Democratic Party, instead falling back on Joe McCarthy’s advice that “‘democratic’ sounds too nice” and instead Republicans should always “call it the Democrat Party, with an emphasis on the ‘rat’!” If you don’t know what I mean, just listen to the Republicans who appear on the Sunday political shows. And, sadly, Democrats and news people don’t even bother to call them out any more.

That’s the context in which the testimony by Smith must be understood. What we watched wasn’t just a partisan disagreement; it was an embarrassingly public demonstration of how deeply-monetized lying has woven itself into the Republican Party’s operating system, even before a pathological liar became the party’s standard-bearer.

Smith calmly laid out the facts and legal standards, and Republican members responded by repeating b------t narratives that have already been disproven in scores of courtrooms, in sworn testimony, and on the public record.

They accused him of “weaponizing” the Justice Department despite the fact that his investigations relied heavily on Republican witnesses (he didn’t have a single Democratic witness on his lists for his proposed prosecutions of Trump) and followed long-established prosecutorial rules.
Republicans desperately tried to frame routine subpoenas and phone metadata requests as “spying,” knowing full well those tools are standard operations in any serious criminal investigation.
They minimized or redirected responsibility for January 6 while Smith stated plainly that Donald Trump caused it and then set out to exploit the violence to keep himself in power.
They substituted grievance, character assassination, and personal insult for engaging with the evidence, turning the hearing into material for their fundraising emails and “sharable” or “viral” cable news clips rather than a serious attempt to find the truth.

Those moments illustrate the multiple layers of the lies Republicans have been selling us for four decades, as well as the new ones Trump is trying to get away with. They’re lying to the public about what the law allows, lying about what the evidence shows, lying about how investigations work, lying to delegitimize any person or institution that threatens their power, and lying to base voters who’ve been trained to accept the lies as gospel.

Each of those lies has value; each can be cashed in for attention, money, or even political or legal protection.

This poisoning of the GOP and its base didn’t start with Trump or on January 6.

For four decades, Republicans have lied relentlessly about taxes, promising that tax cuts for billionaires would lift working families even as wages stagnated and wealth exploded at the top.
They lied about “free trade,” insisting it would empower workers while entire communities were hollowed out and then told their suffering was just some weird but inevitable force of economic nature.
They lied about unions, portraying them as corrupt or obsolete while quietly celebrating the theft of power from labor to capital.
They lied about monopolies, calling consolidation “efficiency” while prices rose, competition vanished, and the average American family is spending $5,000 a year more than necessary because of this “monopoly tax.”
They lied about deregulation, dismissing pollution and climate damage as imaginary or exaggerated while entire communities paid the health and environmental costs and thousands lose their homes every year.
They lied about immigrants, claiming they were more likely to be criminals than American citizens when the opposite is true.
They lied about fossil fuel subsidies, calling them “energy security” while gutting green projects that threatened entrenched Republican donors.
The White House even lied about a protestor yesterday, editing her picture with AI to make it look like she was crying when arrested when the opposite was the case.

Every one of those lies followed the same pattern: ignore the data, attack the messengers, repeat the talking point, and cash the check.

Citizens United — which came into being when Clarence Thomas, himself on the take from a rightwing Nazi-memorabilia-collecting billionaire with business before the Court, became the deciding vote — supercharged that cycle. As a result, billionaires can now pour unlimited money into politics, teaching Republican politicians which stories are rewarded and which are punished.

With corruption having become the underlying foundation of the GOP, lying became not just acceptable but necessary. Telling the truth about inequality, climate change, immigration, corporate power, Trump’s crimes, the state of our health care system, or even democracy itself threatens the party’s revenue stream.

What made yesterday’s hearing so particularly revealing is that it showed how normalized lying has become for GOP politicians.

The Republican inquisitors evinced no embarrassment, no hesitation, and didn’t even attempt to reconcile their own claims with any of the known facts. The lies were delivered as ritual, as tribal identity markers, as proof of belonging. As we saw in Germany in the 1930s and the USSR in the mid-20th century, this is what happens when a political party internalizes lying as a political strategy.

M. Scott Peck warned decades ago that social systems built on lies eventually lose the capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy, loyalty from morality, or raw power from truth. We’re watching his 1986 warning play out in real time.

From the Reagan Revolution and his massive tax cuts to George W. Bush sending our young men and women off to Iraq and Afghanistan to Donald Trump pushing his claim he won 2020, when lying is rewarded by billionaire donors, complicit media, and with gullible voters, it doesn’t stay confined to campaign ads. It metastasizes through institutions, corrodes accountability, and turns governance into mere theater.

Citizens United didn’t just corrupt elections: it corrupted truth itself. And until we reverse it, until we restore the idea that democracy isn’t for sale and reality isn’t optional, lying will remain the most profitable commodity in Republican politics.

And our country will be forced to continue paying the price.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This chilling Trump message led to murder

Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even Whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.

But that’s not their real message.

Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.

One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.

“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”

His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:

“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In other words: “Obey or die!”

It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.

This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.

Noem and Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.

Their real message — and Trump’s, Stephen Miller’s, and JD Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:

“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”

And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.

Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington, D.C., perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.

Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.

Billionaires are buying fancy homes around D.C. so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.

And the message under it all is:

“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”

Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.

— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.

Their message: “Obey or die.”

— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.

He didn’t obey, so he had to die.

These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Vladimir Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Viktor Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Recip Tayyep Erdoğan does in Turkey, and Abdel Fattah El-Sisi does in Egypt, among others.

This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook, as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”

It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.

They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”

And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.

The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.

Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.

When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.

That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğan, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.

Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.

We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.

Trump himself has already been found guilty of fraud multiple times, exposed for stealing money from a children’s cancer charity, and found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. His lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.

Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.

Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.

Soon, everybody is silent.

Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”

And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This Trump ploy isn't just scandalously unethical: it's yet another impeachable offense

This isn’t merely scandalous or unethical: it’s impeachable on its face and dangerous to the survival of democracy worldwide.

Donald Trump is trying to use a United Nations resolution to justify making himself King of the World via a new “Board of Peace” that Trump says “might” replace the UN, with the ability to pass the title along to his son, Don Jr., if he continues to please his father.

No, this isn’t an exaggeration.

It all started when the United Nations Security Council voted to accept Resolution 2803 on Nov. 17, to make effective the Gaza peace plan agreed to by Israel and Hamas in October 2025.

Resolution 2803 called for a two-year international stabilization force and a “Board of Peace” to oversee the process in the region. It was explicit, however, that this would be a board with a very limited portfolio:

“The Security Council, Welcoming the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict … Welcomes the establishment of the Board of Peace (BoP) as a transitional administration with international legal personality that will set the framework, and coordinate funding for, the redevelopment of Gaza pursuant to the Comprehensive Plan, and in a manner consistent with relevant international legal principles, until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 and the Saudi-French Proposal, and can securely and effectively take back control of Gaza.”

In response to that, Trump had his administration lawyers create an entirely new private, non-governmental “treaty‑based international organization” with its own legal personality, that is not a U.S. government agency, corporation, or standard NGO/non‑profit. This new entity called the “Board of Peace” would:

Make Trump its chairman, with essentially absolute power and a veto over every action.
Make the chairman the only person able to invite or approve new member-states into the group.
Give Trump the sole ability to appoint his own successor as heir/successor/chairman, such as Don Jr.
Keep the Board of Peace in existence for perpetuity should the current or a subsequent Chairman decide.
Make the entrance fee for permanent members $1 billion each, money the Chairman controls.

The draft charter Trump has proposed for his Board of Peace doesn’t even mention Gaza, anywhere; as a result, it appears designed to replace the UN as a new governing body for the entire world.

When asked if Trump intended the Board to replace the UN, he replied that it “might” do so, adding:

“The UN should have settled every one of the wars that I settled. I never went to them. I never even thought to go to them.”

The White House has already named the first four Executive Board members: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, billionaire and Trump friend Steve Witkoff, former British prime minister Tony Blair, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Vladimir Putin also indicated he’d like to join and suggested Russia’s billion-dollar entrance fee could come from funds already seized by the US government.

This “give us an inch and we’ll take a mile” attempt to co-opt the power and role of the UN and give it entirely to the Trump family, creating a new international royal family that could rule the world for generations to come, was described by Jacob T. Levy, a political theory professor at McGill University, as “impeachable.”

“Regardless of whether this organization ever even looks in the direction of Gaza, it’s an assault on the international order subordinating the decisions of states to the personal jurisdiction of the Trump family … It’s hard to be shocked anymore, I know, but we should be shocked.”

This international power grab also comports with Trump’s statement yesterday at Davos that his becoming a dictator for the world would be a good thing:

“…I’m a dictator,” he told a reception for CEOs, adding, “But sometimes you need a dictator.”

It’s an echo of his statement last August as he was ordering troops into the streets of Washington, DC:

“A lot of people are saying, maybe we like a dictator,” then added, speaking of people’s comments about himself, “Already they’re saying he’s a dictator. The place is going to hell and we’ve got to stop it.”

With no elections, accountability, or checks-and-balances, this “Board of Peace” is a direct assault on democracy worldwide. The chairman (Trump) is not answerable to voters, Congress, courts, or international law: this is the opposite of democratic governance.

The chairman overrides all collective decisions, and even if member states vote, their decisions mean nothing without Trump’s approval. That isn’t democracy, it’s veto-by-monarchy.

This is designed to normalize authoritarian governance worldwide, fulfilling Putin’s dream. If the U.S. president can create a parallel global authority that ignores democratic norms, why shouldn’t other strongmen like him and Xi Jinping do the same? Or simply start ignoring UN mandates and rules, saying they now submit to the BoP’s authority instead?

It’s also corruption, plain and simple. The billion-dollar “fee” to stay in good standing is legalized bribery, making the entire scheme simply a form of extortion dressed up as governance: pay or be expelled.

Because membership can be terminated at the chairman’s whim — even after payment — this isn’t a real “treaty organization”: it’s a protection racket that violates the most basic anti-corruption norms the U.S. claims to defend. “Nice little country you have there; we’ll help you bring peace if you pay up to the Trump family…”

It’s also establishing a new form of dynastic rule with the Trump family at its center. Trump appointing his own successor isn’t even subtle: it’s a proposal for hereditary power without even the pretense of merit or consent.

And, because the Trump family, not the American people, controls the future of the organization, it’s not even a nod in the direction of the democracy our Founders and generations of Americans have fought and died to bring into being and keep alive. Even if voters were to decisively reject Trumpism at the ballot box, the Trump dynasty would still keep power at a level above the United States itself.

This mirrors the logic of autocracies the U.S. claims to oppose, including Russia, North Korea, and the Gulf monarchies that are all so dear to Trump. America fought a revolution to escape dynastic rule, but now Trump wants to establish one here and then export it worldwide.

Trump’s “Board of Peace” is a direct threat to American constitutional government because the US itself, under the terms of this charter, becomes subject to Trump’s personal authority. Under the proposed document, the U.S. can be expelled unless it pays a ransom or pleases the chairman.

This also undermines the American presidency as an institution — and future American presidents — because a future democratically elected president could be extorted or sidelined by this private Trump-led entity. It also bypasses Congress entirely with no treaties, no ratification, and no oversight. This isn’t “America First”: it’s Trump and his family first, raw personal power, with America Optional.

And it takes a direct whack at the international order established by the United Nations eighty-plus years ago. The BoP charter doesn’t even bother to mention Gaza, its supposedly humanitarian justification. International law is thus replaced by the Trump family’s personal jurisdiction, and nation-states are no longer equal actors; they become simple clients dependent on Trump’s favor.

The structure also rewards authoritarian regimes and punishes democracies. Dictators can pay, flatter, and comply, while democracies are constrained by law and public accountability and thus disadvantaged.

Already, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has said, “We have, of course, accepted this honorable invitation.” After the United States pulled back from 66 UN organizations and is now $1 billion in arrears on our dues, the 21 nations already committed to signing up also include: Bahrain, Morocco, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Israel, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, Uzbekistan and Mongolia.

This dangerous precedent doesn’t bring peace to Gaza or anyplace else. Instead, it replaces law with loyalty to the Trump dynasty.

If Trump can get away this, so can the next demagogue because once democratic norms are abandoned, they don’t magically return. It sets a precedent for private, unaccountable global power.

Which is why Jacob Levy is right: this is impeachable on its face. This phony “Board of Peace” is a personal power project that treats democracy as an inconvenience, the rule of law as optional, and the world as a Trump family inheritance.

We should be as shocked and furious as are the leaders of Europe’s top democracies — who have said they will not participate — and moving quickly toward impeaching our wannabe king and his courtiers.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Trump's Davos embarrassment proves who is pulling his strings

Donald Trump went to Davos on Wednesday morning and gave the speech that Vladimir Putin wanted him to, lying and pissing off Europe and shaking the North Atlantic alliance to its core.

Our president has refused to help Ukraine in any meaningful way for a year now, giving Russia the room to destroy much of that country’s electric and heat infrastructure so badly that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to cancel his trip to Davos to deal with the crisis.

Trump’s now invaded Venezuela and is threatening the same with Greenland, legitimizing Putin’s land-grabs in Georgia and Ukraine.

Trump’s ICE goons are destroying the rule of law in America, running amok in Minneapolis, punishing — and killing — the residents of that city for having elected politicians who’d dare advocate democracy over autocracy.

Russian media is proudly proclaiming that their own internal crackdowns on immigrants, dissidents, and people of color aren’t so bad because Trump’s doing the same thing in America. We’ve legitimized Putin’s racist police state.

Trump’s destroyed much of America’s “soft power,” our friendly relations with resource-rich developing nations, by killing off John F. Kennedy’s USAID program, directly causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with more to come.

Many of the countries we’ve abandoned are now re-aligning themselves with Russia and China, to Putin’s delight.

Trump’s duplicating Putin’s “enemy within” rhetoric to amplify the Russian-promoted “Great Replacement Theory” meme that claims wealthy Jews are paying to have Black and brown people “replace” white men in their jobs and lives.

It’s become the operating system for ICE and is tearing America apart, pitting friends, neighbors, and relatives against each other while Russian media celebrates.

The biggest thorn in Putin’s side has been NATO, all the way back to his days as a murderous KGB intelligence officer, and Trump is now shaking that organization all the way down to its foundations by threatening to seize Greenland and trash-talking alliance member states.

Early on as Putin was rolling out his dictatorship, having destroyed Russia’s brief experiment with democracy, he put himself above the law by simply refusing to enforce rights the Russian constitution and laws gave to average citizens.

Trump’s today doing the same thing, simply defying the Epstein Transparency Act and other laws while approving as his ICE goons routinely violate Americans’ civil rights.

From Russia’s point of view, America’s biggest historic strength hasn’t been our formidable military (they have just as many nukes) but was our rock-solid multi-century relationships with allies.

Today, Canada is — for the first time in over a century — preparing to fight back against an American invasion, while the European Union is trying to figure out how to disentangle itself from our economy in the event we start a war with them.

Meanwhile a bigoted Australian billionaire family continues to pump daily pro-Russian-worldview (racist, nationalist, anti-democratic) poison into the minds of Americans.

In the 1940s, Sir Keith Murdoch built his family’s media empire, in part, by running sensationalist articles about Black American GIs stationed in Australia during World War II “raping” and having affairs with white Australian women. Now Fox “News” is one of the most frequently quoted American sources for Putin’s captured domestic media, according to The New York Times.

Everything Trump does, when it doesn’t involve soliciting bribes, hustling pardons, or making himself richer inures benefit directly to Putin. Which raises the question diplomats and leaders across Europe are increasingly asking out loud: why are elected Republicans tolerating this?

Is it just because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized bribery and thus billionaire oligarchs who don’t believe in democracy now own them?

For example, billionaire Peter Theil, who financed JD Vance’s rise to power as the senator from Ohio, has said:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Could it be that most Republican politicians simply agree with those types of sentiments, that democracy is mob rule and inconvenient, and that strongman autocracy is a more stable and predictable form of government? That they’d love to jettison European and Asian democracies in favor of corrupt police states like Russia and Hungary where they can get away with just about anything just so long as they keep the emperor happy?

After all, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was nakedly taking millions in “gifts” from rightwing billionaires with business before the Court and became the deciding vote in the Citizens United case; are Republicans going along with Trump’s corruption because they, themselves, are also taking bribes and using otherwise illegal insider information to make themselves rich?

Or is it because six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity from crimes and he thinks of himself as America’s monarch, as if he were mad King Ludwig of yore?

Are Republicans afraid — as Mitt Romney told his biographer, McKay Coppins — that Trump will use the force of law or activate his lone-wolf white supremacist terrorists to bring GOP politicians to heel or even have their families intimidated or their homes attacked like the Trump supporter who went after Paul Pelosi?

Could it be that Republicans know that most Americans — at least those who haven’t bought fully into the Fox “News” and MAGA cults — have figured out that the GOP’s only loyalty is to billionaires and massive corporations?

All they’ve done since the Reagan Revolution is cut taxes on the morbidly rich while gutting the agencies that catch criminal or unethical activity in government and the military; maybe the GOP now realizes we’ve got their number and that’s why they’re working so hard to purge voting rolls in Blue cities?

Trump’s shocking behavior — and the even more shameful docility of elected Republicans and the lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with — raises questions that will probably only be answered by future historians.

Nonetheless, we must push back. Democrats need to grow a spine, and the upcoming vote on the DHS budget is a great place to start. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) have indicated they may support the legislation, while Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Sen. Rubén Gallego (D-AZ) are signaling a fierce opposition. The battle will almost certainly play out in the Senate over a Democratic filibuster; you can call your two senators and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at 202-224-3121.

Democrats also must signal now and repeatedly that Trump’s pro-Putin, anti-American rhetoric and actions are so unacceptable that impeachment is necessary, both for him and his brownnosers at DHS, ICE, and the FBI.

And if there are any Republicans who have left an ounce of decency, now is the time for them to stand up and speak out. And not to back away as soon as Trump growls, the way Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Todd Young (R-IN) just did with the proposed Venezuela war powers legislation.

Republican senator Barry Goldwater famously walked from the Capitol to the White House to inform Richard Nixon that his criminality had become so severe and obvious that Republicans in Congress could no longer support him and would, if necessary, vote to impeach and convict him.

America needs today’s Republicans to find their spines, reclaim their integrity and patriotism, and politically stop Trump in his tracks. And maybe it’s starting to happen: Republican Rep. Don Bacon (R-NB) just told reporters he’s threatening impeachment:

“I’ll be candid with you: There’s so many Republicans mad about this [Greenland issue]. If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: The off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this and he’s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.”

It’s a start, but there’s a long way to go if Trump is to be held to account.

When future historians ask what Putin wanted from Trump, the answer may be painfully simple: “Everything America once stood for.”

Whether that happens is not yet settled and ultimately depends on what we Americans — across the political spectrum — do next.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This conservative lie made Trump possible and will hasten our downfall

For decades, Americans were told that “conservative values” stood for restraint, responsibility, and respect for the rule of law. The rise of Donald Trump forces an unavoidable question: were those values abandoned, or were they a generational lie that made his authoritarian takeover possible?

The billionaires and CEOs funding Trump and the Republicans in Congress believe they’re invincible. They believe the GOP’s abandonment of the principles that animated John McCain and Mitt Romney in favor of authoritarianism and oligarchy will keep them fat and happy.

They’re wrong.

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh said something on my radio program on Monday that would have been shocking just a few years ago but now is becoming increasingly self-evident to anybody with a conscience and an honest view of American politics and history.

He said the GOP as a party with an ideology, a set of principles, or even a governing philosophy is now almost entirely dead.

It’s been replaced by a violent, racist, lawless, unprincipled cult organized entirely around Trump. It’s a cult that demands total loyalty and punishes dissent with both political annihilation and, increasingly, with threats of real-world violence.

Remember when Romney said there were plenty of Republicans in the Senate who wanted to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, but they began flipping when senators started getting death threats against their families?

His biographer, McKay Coppins, wrote that Romney told him “story after story about Republican members of Congress, Republican senators, who at various points wanted to vote for impeachment — vote to convict Trump — and decided not to, not because they thought he was innocent, but because they were afraid for their family’s safety.”

That terror is delivered from the hands of both prosecutors who can threaten imprisonment and MAGA lone-wolf assassins like the one who murdered Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota, and those who routinely terrorize federal judges who rule against Trump.

Republican elected officials, Walsh said, echoing Romney, now live in a state of deep fear. Not a metaphorical fear, but genuine terror.

It includes a fear of physical violence, the fear of being primaried and losing their jobs, and the very legitimate terror that Trump will turn the power of the state against them and thus break them financially with legal fees and the threat of prison, as he’s trying to do today with Letitia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff, etc.

Mark Twain noted that history rhymes, and this one is getting downright alarming.

The end of the modern-day GOP and its conversion into a fascist-tolerant party started with Ronald Reagan flipping classical economics on its head with his “supply side” scam and his scapegoating Black people to justify gutting social and educational programs, all to benefit his morbidly rich donors.

Reagan’s policies destroyed the American union movement, exploded the costs of health care, housing, and college education, and stole $51 trillion from working class people, putting almost every penny of it into the money bins of the GOP’s morbidly rich patrons.

He did this because devastating the working class was actually part of the plan to return “stability” to the American social order, following the outline of Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind, the Heritage Foundation’s 1980 Mandate for Leadership, and Lewis Powell’s infamous memo.

Out of the chaos of the collapse of the middle class, Republicans believed they could rebuild our nation along the lines of a new form of feudalism, one of the most stable of the ancient governing systems. And when Trump came along, riding the wave of outrage at the economic devastation Reaganism had caused, they thought they could control him, too.

Pro tip: you can’t control the madman.

Fritz Thyssen, the steel baron who was one of Germany’s richest industrialists in the 1930s, wrote a book about how he’d made the same bet American billionaires and Republican politicians are making today: he thought he could ride a tiger that would make him massively richer but never turn and devour him.

His book I Paid Hitler (my book-collecting father gave me a copy 54 years ago for my 21st birthday) — which lays out how he personally convinced Paul von Hindenburg to make Hitler chancellor and raised the Nazi Party’s first 3 million Reichsmarks so they could win their first national election — reads like a modern-day tragedy.

At first, Thyssen got along with Hitler and even believed he was influencing the man, but when he began to object to some of the Nazi leader’s worse excesses he had to flee the country with his family to avoid being murdered.

Dictators, he learned — even those who only start out as a “dictator for a day” — play for keeps.

Thyssen described how traditional German conservatives also convinced themselves they could ride a demagogue into power and then control him. They feared the left more than they feared authoritarianism, believed “order in society” mattered more than democracy, and were certain that once Hitler’s power was secured, moderation would follow.

What followed instead, however, was a demand for total submission or the threat of total personal and national destruction.

Thyssen’s story shows us how fear dissolves loyalty to principles and power silences the soft voice of conscience. Loyalty to a man replaces loyalty to the law and its traditions.

By the time conservatives realized what they’d enabled, escaping Germany was the only remaining option; Thyssen fled the country in 1939 (although the Vichy French captured him and turned him over to the Nazis, who imprisoned him until the end of the war).

That brings us back to Russell Kirk and his landmark book The Conservative Mind that I write about at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Although Kirk argued strongly for “classes and order,” claiming that inequality is both natural and good, he also tried to anchor American conservatism in moral restraint, historical humility, institutional continuity, and a deep suspicion of demagogues and mass movements.

He warned repeatedly that if conservatives were to abandon those restraints out of fear or resentment, they’d become something else entirely. He explicitly feared rightwing hate ideology, leader worship, and the belief that force could substitute for virtue.

There’s little doubt Kirk would have despised Trump. Trump embodies almost everything Kirk warned against: contempt for history and institutions, appetite over restraint, grievance over stewardship, and power over a moral order. Trump is not even remotely a conservative in any Burkean or Kirkian sense.

He was able to seize control of the GOP because, over the past four decades, much of American conservatism has simply hollowed itself out as it embraced racism (Southern Strategy); promoted lies about trickle down, voter fraud, and tax cuts; and conducted debt-financed foreign adventurism including Iraq and Afghanistan.

What survived was hierarchy, nationalism, hostility to the left, cultural grievance, and the protection of wealth. Tragically, the GOP has discarded the moral restraint, constitutional humility, reverence for truth, and respect for institutional limits that were once elevated by men like Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and Mitt Romney.

Starting in the 1980s, American conservatism became less a philosophy than a set of race- and gender-based resentments married to perpetual deregulation and tax cuts for the party’s morbidly rich donors. Once that happened, the GOP was defenseless against a charismatic authoritarian who promised dominance and control instead of democracy.

Trump didn’t hijack conservatism from the outside: he stepped into a vacuum created by the GOP’s abandonment of constitutional and traditional American principles. Like Thyssen’s peers, today’s Republican donors and leaders believed they could use the wannabe dictator, ride his popularity, placate his followers, and keep the machinery of government power under control.

They were wrong in the same way German conservatives were wrong, and for the same reasons. Once fear takes over as a governing principle, the most ruthless and outspoken leader will inevitably own the party. Everybody else gets destroyed, some sooner, some later.

Now the GOP exists as a sort of permanent loyalty test. Tell the truth and you’re exiled, uphold the Constitution and you’re primaried, defy the leader and you’re threatened with death or imprisonment.

As Walsh pointed out, most Republicans know exactly what’s happening. They know the lies are lies, the elections weren’t stolen, and under Trump and Kristi Noem violence is being normalized. Many know where this road leads, but fear of Trump’s wrath silences them more effectively than their conservative ideology ever unified them.

This is where the comparison between today’s Republicans and their donors to Thyssen becomes unavoidable. In Germany, conservatism didn’t just die the day Hitler seized power. It began to collapse a decade or more earlier, when conservatives decided that democracy, law, and moral restraint were simply political tools rather than binding commitments.

Once they crossed that line, they lost both the authority and the moral courage to resist Hitler and his Nazi Party. As a result, when the time of real terror directed at them arrived a few years later, that terror was all that was left of the system.

That is where the GOP now stands. It’s no longer a party arguing about tax rates or regulation or even federalism. It’s become, instead, an cult of personal loyalty dedicated to the deification and enrichment of one man and his family. That’s neither conservatism nor democracy.

Which brings us to the question Democrats — and the rest of us — today find ourselves confronting: what do we do about it?

First, Democrats must stop treating this as a normal partisan contest. This isn’t a disagreement over policy, it’s a struggle over whether the United States remains a constitutional republic governed by law or becomes a fascist regime organized around loyalty and fear. Democrats must say that plainly, repeatedly, and without euphemism. Not “threats to norms,” not “concerns about rhetoric,” but the clear truth: one of our two major parties has abandoned democracy and embraced fascism.
Second, Democrats should relentlessly frame Trumpism not as strength but as weakness. Authoritarian movements thrive on the myth of invincibility, and Thyssen tells us how that myth collapses when its confronted. Democrats should point out, over and over again, that a party that can’t tolerate dissent, won’t allow truth-tellers, and must rely on hate, fear, and intimidation is not strong, but is fundamentally brittle and weak.
Third, Democrats should invite disaffected conservatives like Joe Walsh and independents into a pro-democracy coalition without demanding ideological conformity. This is not the moment for purity tests: traditions — including our democratic traditions — survive by coalition and continuity. As fanatic a progressive as I am, I also know Democrats must welcome former Republicans, libertarians, faith conservatives, and business leaders who still believe in the Constitution, even if they disagree on taxes, healthcare, or regulation. The message should be simple: democracy first, arguments later.
Fourth, Democrats must model the courage of our Founders and the generations since who fought for democracy. That means unrelentingly defending courts, free speech, and the rule of law. The contrast matters: as we saw in South Korea when Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from power last year, authoritarian movements collapse when their opponents are willing to fight for democracy rather than flee or hide in panic.
And finally, this isn’t just about politicians. We average citizens have the biggest role to play, and Thyssen’s story makes clear what happens when we don’t.

Speak up loud and frequently. Support local journalism. Show up to school board meetings, city councils, and your local Democratic Party meetings. Defend your neighbors who’re being targeted by Trump and his ICE goons. Double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

Authoritarianism feeds on isolation; democracy survives on solidarity and participation.

The most chilling part of Thyssen’s book isn’t that he and his family had to flee Germany: it’s that by the time they did in 1939, it was the only option left.

For those of us who Trump identified in his National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), it might be a matter of months or a year or two unless he and his regime are blocked from moving forward with their repression. America’s top three experts on fascism have already fled the country; if we don’t win this battle for the soul of America, the same may become necessary for many Americans sooner than we’d like to imagine.

Although the media covered it as a one-day story, NSPM-7 directs the FBI, ICE, other federal police agencies, and over 200 local police departments coordinating with them to begin putting together dossiers on any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[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.”

If that list includes you or people you love, now is the time to speak up and take positive political action to stop this missile aimed at the heart of our democracy and our Bill of Rights.

Russell Kirk warned that social and political order without moral restraint becomes despotism. Fritz Thyssen taught us that conservatives who empower authoritarians don’t survive the experience. Joe Walsh is describing the end state of that process in real time: a party that has ceased to exist as a governing institution and now operates only as an extension of one demented man’s will.

History doesn’t guarantee outcomes, but it does show us trajectories. Fear is never a stable foundation for politics and only delays the day of reckoning. And the longer the party exploiting it delays, the more catastrophic that reckoning becomes.

The lesson here isn’t that conservative values inevitably lead to authoritarianism: it’s that any political movement without courage, conscience, and adherence to constitutional principles and individual freedom eventually dies.

If “conservative values” can be so easily discarded in favor of fear, loyalty, and power, then they were never values at all, only a story they cynically told us to get elected.

Hopefully that’ll sink in for enough Republicans — and be loudly pointed out by enough Democrats — soon enough to rescue our republic from Germany’s fate.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This Nebraska mom's ordeal points to the darkness awaiting us all under Trump

Nebraska mom Jamie Bonkiewicz filmed her interaction with Secret Service agents and police who came to her door because of a tweet.

“The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is going after multiple Democratic members of the House and Senate, the governors of two states, the mayor of Minneapolis, and any Republican who speaks against Trump or his lickspittles:

Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Miles Taylor…

Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?

Back in 1994, I was invited by a parents group in Singapore to speak about education and ADHD; my book on the topic had just made the cover of TIME magazine. I flew in, they put me up in the city/state’s fanciest hotel, and late the following afternoon I gave my speech. When, during the Q&A afterward, somebody asked me how best to institute the public school reforms I’d suggested, I said words to the effect of, “Get politically active, get your politicians involved, as they control and fund the schools.”

The room went completely quiet, which I thought odd, but then the conversation moved on and I didn’t think about it again until a few hours later when I arrived back at the hotel. My room had been ransacked. The bed was askew, drawers emptied, my suitcase all over the floor, even my toiletry kit spread across the bathroom floor.

When I called down to the hotel’s switchboard to let them know what had happened, the manager came up to my room and carefully told me that the police had visited my room while I was out.

“You must have done or said something suspicious,” he told me. That’s when I remembered the eerie silence in response to my suggestion that people get politically active.

America isn’t Singapore. Yet.

Or Russia, where even standing in the street with a blank sign will get you prison time. Yet.

Or Hungary, where posting on Facebook against Viktor Orbán will get you thrown into jail. Yet.

But we’re sure as hell moving in that direction.

Retired professor Barbara Wien stood outside Stephen Miller’s home passing out “No Nazis in NOVA” [North Virginia] fliers with his picture and the slogan, “Wanted for crimes against humanity.” Three weeks later, she was visited by agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, and a Virginia state policeman, because Miller’s podcaster wife had reportedly called them.

In addition to intimidating Wien, they had a search warrant signed by a judge and took her phone. The New York Times notes:

“The activist … has not been charged with any crime, though the Virginia State Police still have her phone. The investigation remains active, leaving it unclear whether law enforcement has since gathered additional evidence.”

Her lawyer told the Times about his client and the activists who’d been distributing similar flyers in town:

“They were speaking truth to power, and that is really at the core of our Constitution. It’s a principle and a right that our country was founded on.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had been reporting on Trump’s corruption and reorganization of our government, so FBI agents showed up at her home and took her phone, her laptop, and her sports watch, which had a record of everywhere she’d visited for the past few weeks. They were apparently looking for the names and locations of the federal employees she may have interviewed. As theTimes reported:

“It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.”

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Meanwhile, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston just said out loud what millions of Americans are feeling in their gut. U.S. District Judge William G. Young, hardly a lefty firebrand, looked at the evidence in front of him and concluded that the Trump administration is using the machinery of the state to punish speech it doesn’t like.

“I find it breathtaking,” Young said, that he was forced to conclude that “high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — [were] conspiring to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States.”

Young was presiding over a case involving the arrest and threatened deportation of non-citizen college students and scholars who spoke out on Palestine. What troubled him wasn’t just the individual cases, but the pattern. The brown-nosers around Trump, he said (without using that word), appeared to be deliberately chilling dissent by turning immigration enforcement into a political weapon.

“The record in this case convinces me,” Young said, “that these high officials — and I include the president of the United States — have a fearful view of freedom. A view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded.”

In other words, free speech for those who agree with Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, et al, but fear, harassment, and punishment for those who don’t.

Then Young went farther, in a way judges almost never do. He openly described Trump’s governing style as authoritarian:

“It’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone — everyone in Article II — is going to toe the line absolutely.”

When a Reagan judge with impeccable conservative credentials and four decades on the bench is sounding alarms about authoritarianism and the collapse of First Amendment norms, it’s not partisan noise. It’s a warning flare shot up into the night.

But, of course, the Trump regime doesn’t care about norms or the Constitution. And if what’s going on isn’t clear enough, Stephen Miller posted last night about Minneapolis:

“Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender.”

I spent decades doing international relief work in some of the worst places on the planet. I’ve had government soldiers threaten my life, police put automatic weapons in my face, and government ministers on three continents solicit bribes from me and my organization.

I’ve met with political prisoners and families whose members were murdered by the state for simply having the wrong political view. I’ve held children as they stopped breathing from starvation and had an aid worker shot to death in front of me.

This is the road to third-world-style-governance that our corrupt felon of a president has put America on. He justifies the execution of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, sets his rabid mobs on judges who don’t rule the way he wants, intimidates reporters and sues news outlets to shut them up, and is now threatening to deploy the full force of the federal government to silence dissent, criminalize protest, and punish individual speech he finds inconvenient.

He’s destroying our European alliance to the benefit of his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, writing to the Norwegian Prime Minister as if Trump alone can determine American foreign policy like some sort of emperor or America’s mad king:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace…”

He’s dragging this country step by step toward the sort of strongman state like the ones I used to work in, where loyalty matters more than the law and fear crowds out personal freedom. He’s overseeing a rapid and radical transformation of America from a democratic republic into a strongman oligarchy where billionaires like him, Elon Musk, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the 140 billionaires who supported him in 2024 run the show.

He’s turned America into an oligarchy, in other words. Rich people buy pardons, corporations buy regulations and subsidies they want, and average people are screwed, particularly if they complain too loudly.

But history teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government.

They typically either collapse from their own internal rot (as happened here in 1932 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties) or get overthrown by their own people (as happened here in the 1860s when the fascist Confederate system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War).

And when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny; usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than 20 years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly-liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up fully formed and all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Even days before that tipping point is reached, most people still think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal.

They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Because of the corrupt Supreme Court Citizens United decision and its 1978 parent Bellotti, our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid 40 years.

They own the media, have captured the courts, and have bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Trump and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to outright dictatorship.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare or have the ability to constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every week that the Trump regime isn’t seriously challenged in the states, courts, the press, or at the ballot box, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. I’ve seen it, repeatedly, with my own eyes.

Oligarchies either collapse or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

Thus, the only real question now is whether enough of us will recognize what’s happening while there’s still time to stop it. Republics like ours die — like Russia and Hungary did — when ordinary people convince themselves that the warning signs aren’t real. At least until the knock on the door comes for them.

And then, of course, it’s too late…

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

This was a multi-billion dollar disaster — and Trump is set to do it again

Get ready. Something truly awful may be happening to our economy — at least for average Americans — as the result of Trump’s billions in tax breaks for billionaires, looting of our treasury and economy, $38 trillion national debt, and his corrupt embrace and promotion of foreign autocracies and digital currencies.

If it happens, it’s going to hurt many of us, all while making Trump’s billionaire buddies massively richer.

I remember the look on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s face when the economy crashed in 2008. The former Goldman Sachs CEO’s hands trembled as he stood at a podium and confessed that the GOP’s banking deregulation had blown up the American financial system and very nearly the global economy.

Millions of Americans lost their homes, their jobs, and their retirements that year, but the barons of Wall Street lost nothing — except a brief moment of embarrassment — and then paid themselves tens of billions in bonuses.

About $430 billion was initially shoveled out the federal door and into the banks in just one month. And, tragically, both Bush and Obama decided that not one top donor executive should go to prison, and not even one major bank was broken up.

We coughed up $430 billion to make them whole. And now, it appears, the banksters are at it again.

According to a new report from Lever News, over the past few months the Federal Reserve has quietly extended more than $420 billion in emergency support to Wall Street’s biggest banks in near-silence, with minimal scrutiny, and no serious conditions attached.

This isn’t an accident: it’s the predictable end point of a system that punishes working people for falling behind and rewards billionaires for their political connections.

As headlines today warn of layoffs spreading through U.S. manufacturing (100,000 job losses since Trump took office) and the Federal Reserve is quietly extending hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency support to Wall Street, it’s worth remembering a sobering but basic rule of history: when economies break, the rich make out like bandits.

That’s because recessions are basically shopping sprees for people like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.

When Wall Street banks crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21 percent. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50 percent in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On Oct. 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

The market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, and working people, now out of work, were again selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27 percent in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why average Americans should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of Republican policy choices that get repeated over and over again — 10 of the last 11 recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered in plain sight.

Deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

So no, this warning isn’t fringe: it’s historical and empirical. And it’s being quietly confirmed by the behavior of the people like Warren Buffett — now sitting on $314 billion in cash — who know the markets best and are waiting for the crash to cash in.

So get ready. Reduce your debt as much as possible, nail down your employment and assets, prepare your garden, and get ready to live simply as Trump crashes our economy again just like he did in 2020, and then tries to use that as an excuse to consolidate his power while he and his billionaire buddies again make off like the bandits they are.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Here's what ICE is really doing in Minneapolis — and it's not enforcing the law

This week, Mayor Jacob Frey basically took a Fox “News” host down, pointing out that Trump’s own federal prosecutors just quit their jobs rather than investigate and prosecute Renee Nicole Good’s wife for “domestic terrorism.”

Which raises the question: what is ICE really doing in Minneapolis?

Well over a decade ago, the very Anglo daughter of a friend of mine fell in love with a Hispanic fellow who owned a Mexican restaurant he’d started in her little northern midwestern town. They got married, she got pregnant, and everybody in the family was delighted. Until the feds visited the restaurant and discovered her new husband wasn’t a US citizen and had no legal permission to be here in the country.

This was during the Obama administration. The feds were unfailingly polite. They told him he had a certain amount of time to get his affairs in order but within that period of time he must leave the country, return to Mexico, and apply for asylum or a visa from there. Those were the rules.

Nobody showed up to kick in the front door of their home. Nobody from the government was wearing a mask. No swearing, no threats, no guns, no tear gas, no pepper spray, no hitting his car with theirs or beating either of them to the ground. They merely told him he had to leave and served him with the appropriate paperwork, just like they do in most other democratic countries.

At that time, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had been a guest on my radio/TV show every Friday for about a decade, and we got his office involved, trying to intervene in their case, but the feds were emphatic: he wasn’t here legally and he had to leave. So, after a short time to organize their things and finances, the two of them got on a commercial plane and flew to Mexico, where they both live to this day.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since the 1920s in America, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Barack Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.
By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is not primarily about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

Similarly, never before have we had immigration agents “investigating fraud” as a bullshit premise for terrorizing an entire community. The way they convicted Donald Trump of 34 counts of criminal felony fraud wasn’t with guys with masks and guns; it was a small army of accountants pouring through his financial records.

Never before in modern history have we had a president and vice president characterize an ethnic community in such terms as “eating your dogs and cats,” as “criminals,” as “garbage,” as an “other.”

Never before — other than the Klan in the post-Reconstruction era — have we had agents of the state deputized and authorized to use deadly force who conceal their identities and then ran amok to terrorize entire American cities.

That last point is the key to understanding what’s going on. ICE isn’t in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or any other Blue city to merely enforce our immigration laws. We already know how to do that, as we’ve been doing it successfully for 101 years and never before needed violent masked thugs to make it happen.

No, these people are in these cities for a singular purpose: to spread terror. This is Trump’s own personal Schutzstaffel (SS), a police force answerable only to him who’s principal job is to terrify communities and crush dissent.

Trump, JD Vance, and Stephen Miller have all made it clear that they believe the key to running our country isn’t via the approval of the populace, “the consent of the governed,” but, rather, is to have and use raw, naked power. Violence. Tear gas, tasers, and pepper bullets. The threat of death or imprisonment.

Back in October, Miller said Trump has “plenary authority,” meaning “authority without restrictions.” Ultimate power. Final power. The only real power in the country, at the end of the day.

A few weeks ago, he doubled down, telling CNN's Jake Tapper:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

John Adams referred to us a “a nation of laws, not men.” The Supreme Court building has “Equal Justice Under Law” carved into its front by the Roosevelt administration in October of 1935. Our founding documents refer to America as a nation where our politicians and police “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That’s the opposite of what’s happening right now in Minneapolis.

When demagogues and wannabe autocrats set out to seize absolute power in a nation — the way we’ve seen it done, for example, in Russia — they don’t start by rolling tanks down the street or throwing dissidents or writers like me in prison. That comes much later.

Instead, they start by telling the people who they need to fear.

For Putin, it was the Chechens. For Orbán, it was Syrian refugees. For Joe McCarthy, it was communists and socialists. And for Trump, et al, it’s brown and Black people, particularly if they were born in another country.

Once the populace is sufficiently terrified of the “other,” they’ll accept increasing levels of repression in the name of stemming the danger to themselves and their families. Armed agents of the state begin to show up in public places to “enforce law and order,” but their real goal is to terrify people into submission.

This is why Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are refusing to investigate Renee Good’s murder and instead demanding their federal prosecutors go after her grieving wife. They want not only ICE thugs but everybody in America who may think of challenging them to know that smashing windows, dragging people out of their cars, kicking in their doors, beating them to the ground, and even killing them — all without any legal basis, without a single warrant — are what we can all expect to happen to us if we defy their power.

If ICE’s real mission was to find people in the country without authorization, they wouldn’t be going about it this way; they’d go after undocumented people the way my friend’s daughter’s husband was cornered and deported. Firmly, but politely. With paperwork instead of guns.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to Americans that when Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) two months ago, this is what they had in mind. That Memorandum orders the federal police agencies to go after anybody who presents the following “indicia” of potential domestic terrorism:

“[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.”

ICE is here to remind us of the awesome power Trump and his lickspittles have to enforce that. Question or, as with Renee Good, taunt a masked ICE thug and it’s clear you’re expressing “extremism.” Your penalty will be violence visited upon you, even death, and when you’re dead, they’ll next come after your family.

This is pure Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Xi, and every other tinpot dictator across the planet and throughout history.

It’s why ICE shot a young man in the face, blinding him for the rest of his life, in Santa Ana this week and the feds are refusing to give any information — including the name of the thug who shot 21-year-old Kaden Rummler — to the Santa Ana city or California state police.

It’s why goons in Minneapolis dragged a disabled woman driving to her doctor’s appointment out of her car and assaulted her.

It’s why they deploy tear gas and fire “less lethal” weapons at the slightest provocation.

Yesterday afternoon, doubling down on untouchable state power that lives well above the rule of law, DHS posted the following tweet from Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda Stephen Miller:

“REMINDER. ‘To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.’ @StephenM” (emphasis added)

That message — which is filled with naked lies — is very, very simple: “We have the power. We will use that power. And there’s nothing ‘the little people’ or anybody else can do to stop us. In fact, if you try to stop us, we’ll use that power against you, next.”

Trump is now openly threatening the state of Minnesota with the Insurrection Act, a law that allows a president to deploy the full force of the entire US military directly against the American people.

After a night of confrontations sparked by violent ICE raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Trump took to his Nazi-infested social media site to warn that if state and local officials don’t crush protests against his masked federal agents, he will step in with force.

This isn’t bluster or rhetoric. It’s a direct threat to use wartime powers inside the United States to override local government, suppress dissent, and place raw federal violence above the rule of law, something he appears to want so badly he can taste it.

That kind of threat doesn’t belong in a democracy, and it tells us exactly what this administration believes power is for.

This is nothing more or less than state-sponsored terror. And it’s damn well high time that it stop.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

It's not just ICE actions — Trump's words also point to a deeply sinister truth

When Joe Rogan starts referring to the Trump regime as if they’re Nazis, you know ICE and the GOP have a problem. On Tuesday, Rogan said:

“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? Where’s your papers? Is that what we’ve come to?”

At the end of this month, funding for the Department of Homeland Security runs out. Congress is going to have to act and that makes this a very important moment, politically.

The attraction of ICE to white supremacists — and now their open appeal to racists in their recruiting messages — didn’t start with George W. Bush adopting the word “Homeland” on Oct. 8, 2001, the first time it’d been publicly used by a mainstream politician in American history. It arguably started on Sept. 5, 1934, with a speech by Rudolf Hess, introducing Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg Rally.

I have a weird connection to that speech, and it’s always haunted me. For more than half of my life I’ve been a volunteer for a German-based international relief organization that was founded by Gottfried Müller, who’d been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army until he was captured in Iran and spent virtually all of WWII in a prison camp. There, he had a conversion experience and dedicated his life to helping “the least of the least of this world, as Jesus taught us.”

Müller told me how he was there for that Nuremberg Rally, in which Hess introduced Hitler with the following speech:

“Danke irher Führung wird Deutschland sein Zeil erreichen. Heimat zu sein. Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. (“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a homeland. A homeland to be for all Germans of the world.”)

This use of Heimat (“Homeland”) was intentional on the part of Hess and Hitler. “Homeland” suggested a racial identity, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the German people as a racial organism with the German land (Boden) and hereditarily German people (Volk) inseparable:

“The German Reich must gather together and protect all the racially valuable elements of Germandom, wherever they may be.” (Volume II, chapter 13)

As Herr Müller told me, Hitler wanted to create an identity that went beyond language and culture. He wanted to posit a pure “German race,” and have Germany be that race’s “homeland,” all so he could sell to the German people their own racial superiority and use that to justify exterminating others.

Throughout American history, our leaders have avoided that type of language:

Thomas Paine wrote: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
Abraham Lincoln said our Founders created “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…”
Woodrow Wilson used the word “democracy” instead of “homeland” during WWI: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
FDR simply used the name of our nation on Dec. 7, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”

Across 220-plus years, during revolution, civil war, global war, and even the attack on Pearl Harbor, American presidents systematically avoided homeland-style language that implied ancestral ownership, ethnic belonging, or insiders versus outsiders.

Instead, they used words like: republic, nation, people, citizens, democracy, and country to describe America. This wasn’t accidental: it was the core distinction between American civic nationalism, and 19th century European whites-only ethno-nationalism.

George W. Bush blew that all up when he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I immediately called it out, writing more than 20 years ago that using that word would lead America in a dark direction.

And here we are.

ICE is now openly using white supremacist slogans, memes, and advertisements to recruit men who’re enthusiastic about chasing down Black and brown people. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project documents:

“The increase in white nationalist content [from ICE] appears to originate with a June 11, 2025 post. That day, DHS’ official X and Instagram accounts posted a graphic of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign with the caption: “Help your country … and yourself … REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” A hotline number for ICE accompanied the post.

“Mother Jones reported the doctored graphic of Uncle Sam originated from an X user called ‘Mr. Robert,’ who is associated with white nationalist content. Mr. Robert’s bio highlights the phrase: ‘Wake Up White Man.’

Since then, it’s been a nonstop barrage of white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric and symbology, as compiled by Dean Blundell.

Kristi Noem behind a podium with the words “One of ours. All of yours.” As Malcolm Nance noted: “This is the order to kill all the people in the village of Lidice in Czech Republic when the sadist SS General Heydrich was ambushed and killed by the British SOE. THEY ORDERED 173 MEN MASSACRED. ALL WOMEN AND CHILDREN SENT TO AUSCHWITZ WITH THESE WORDS.”
The US Department of Labor posting an image of George Washington with the words: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” an eerie echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).
Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who showed up in Minneapolis last week, photographed for the ICE/CPB website in nearly-full Nazi drag.

Others consistently feature white people with slogans or images appealing to a white supremacist or nationalist base:

As political scientist Dr. Rachel Bitecofer noted in her excellent The Cycle newsletter:

“‘We’ll have our home again’ is the emotional core of Great Replacement ideology, the white nationalist belief system that frames demographic change as dispossession and recasts the nation as something that has been stolen and must be taken back. This is the same worldview that produced the chant ‘You will not replace us’ at Charlottesville. The only thing that has changed is who is now saying it. …

“This ideology is not abstract. It has been articulated explicitly by mass shooters, embedded in white nationalist manifestos, and popularized by contemporary influencers who now operate openly in American political discourse. Figures like Nick Fuentes center their politics on the claim that the United States properly belongs to a single cultural and racial group, and that reclaiming it requires hierarchy, exclusion, and force.”

From Hess to Bush to Trump, here we are.

One of the regular themes of callers to my radio/TV show is the question:

“Are they hiding their faces behind masks so we can’t see that so many of these well-paid goons are open members of the Klan, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League, and J6ers?”

It’s as good an answer for the masks as any other I can come up with. Throughout American history, the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws.

The police officers who murdered the civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi on June 21, 1964 were all Klansmen, and that’s where Donald Trump Jr. went to give a speech on “states’ rights,” echoing Ronald Reagan’s first official speech on the same subject in the same place after he got his party’s nomination in 1980.

On Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking if their “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” are being used in their recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters:

“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?

“Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”

Racism has been one of the animating themes of Trump’s three candidacies and two administrations; finally Americans and the mainstream media are waking up to it and calling it out.

We need a purge, and that begins by calling our elected officials at 202-224-3121 and telling them to vote “No” on funding DHS and ICE until there have been significant reforms.

Get rid of the masks and weapons of war. Require them to follow the law and the Constitution. No more arrests or home invasions without warrants signed by judges per the Fourth Amendment.

If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out.

It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and it’s ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.