Thom Hartmann

Republicans in Georgia have been champions at pioneering new ways to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their latest scam is breathtaking.

First, the background.

When Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp was Secretary of State — the state’s top elections official — and running against Stacey Abrams for Governor in 2018, Abrams’ organization had registered 53,000 people (70% African American) to vote. Kemp put those registrations on hold so they couldn’t vote in the 2018 election, which he won by 54,723 votes.

But that was just the beginning for Kemp. By the year prior to the 2018 election he’d purged a total of 1.4 million voters from the rolls, claiming he was just removing people who’d died or moved. On a single night in July 2017 he removed half a million voters, about 8% of all registered Georgia voters, an act The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history.”

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Investigative reporter Greg Palast hired the company Amazon uses to verify addresses and ran the names and addresses of those 534,000 people Kemp purged that July day through their system: 334,000 of them, most Black, had neither died nor moved. But they’d sure lost their right to vote.

Then Kemp shut down 8 percent of all the polling places in Georgia just before the election, the majority — recommended as a “cost saving move” by a white consultant Kemp had hired — in Black neighborhoods. Did I mention that he “won” that election by only 54,723 votes?

In 2020, when Stacey Abrams again challenged Kemp for the governorship, Kemp’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff-ens-purger”) purged another 309,000 voters from the rolls; Palast hired the company again and found that 198,351 of them had neither died nor moved.

It’s worth noting that if Brian Kemp wanted to take away a gun from any Georgia resident, Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that he’d have to go to court and prove his case; to purge voters from the rolls and take away their votes, though, Republicans on the Supreme Court have also ruled that Kemp doesn’t even need to notify those voters.

This year, Kemp signed a new law allowing any citizen to present a list of voters they believe must be purged from the rolls; one person, Marjorie Taylor Greene ally and Republican activist Pam Reardon, submitted a list of 32,000 voters, and the Chairman of the Ft. Benning area GOP, Alton Russell, challenged over 4,000 voters. A total of 149,000 voters were challenged by a handful of white Republican activists.

These tricks have helped keep Republicans in charge of Georgia politics, a state that would almost certainly be blue if every citizen were allowed to easily vote.

But there was some blowback to Kemp’s and Raffensperger’s “mass purge by vote vigilantes” strategy, so now comes Kemp’s latest trick.

This week Georgia rolled out a new website where people can let the state know they’ve moved (or their relative has died) and cancel their voter registration online. It’s super easy; you just plug in your information and, poof, your voter registration vanishes.

This would seem to be a solution in search of a problem. For example, over the past 50 years I’ve lived in Michigan, New Hampshire, Germany, Georgia, Vermont, Oregon, Washington DC, and then Oregon again: I never once let a state know I’d moved. Nobody does.

Instead, states track death records and the expiration of drivers’ licenses to determine who’s died and moved so they can then cancel registrations appropriately. My being registered to vote in both, say, Washington DC and Oregon when I only live in Oregon, is not a problem for DC if I don’t try to vote there. And nobody ever tries to vote twice just because they’ve moved; it’s a form of “voter fraud” that just doesn’t happen in any meaningful numbers.

But “keeping the voter rolls clean” — as if it were an urgent imperative making the wait for drivers’ licenses to expire just too dangerous — is the new excuse for Kemp’s Georgia website. Nobody’s believing the GOP’s “mass voter fraud” schtick anymore, so they’re reverting to this rational-sounding new way of getting Democrats removed from the voting rolls.

The problem with the new “cancel my registration” site is that bad actors, if they know a person’s name, address, DOB, and either Social Security or drivers’ license number, can simply go in and cancel other people they don’t want voting.

The “safety barrier” is that Republican activists who want to delete voter registrations in areas they know are heavily Democratic might be deterred from trying to do that with this new site, because they don’t have all that data on every Georgia voter.

Until this week.

For an hour Monday, the entire Georgia voter database — including names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security and drivers’ license numbers — was publicly posted on that very site. Oops, Kemp said! Anybody could download it and share it with others, including Republican activists who might want to keep on purging Democratic voters.

As the Executive Director of the Georgia Democratic Party said, “This portal is ripe for abuse by right-wing activists who are already submitting mass voter challenges meant to disenfranchise Georgians.”

When the Associated Press — which downloaded and printed out the list — showed it to the Georgia State Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, she was horrified, pointing out, “If someone knows my birthdate, you could get in and pull up my information and change my registration.”

This is nuts.

Vice President Kamala Harris has promised that if she’s elected president and gets a Democratic House and Senate, the first piece of legislation she’ll sign will be the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which will put an end to Kemp’s games in Georgia and similar Republican stunts across the nation.

If you think it should be harder to take away your vote than your gun, double-check your voter registration (especially if you live in a Red state) and show up this fall!

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The GOP’s 43-year tax-cuts-for-billionaires-while-we-ignore-the-needs-of-the-country grift has an analogy in condos and homes across America that might help voters understand how it works and how they’ve gotten away with it.

Fully 84 percent of all homes and apartments built and sold in 2022 came with a homeowner’s association (HOA), and an estimated 27 percent of all homeowners nationwide currently live in a property controlled by an HOA.

And many are very unhappy about the experience.

According to a survey by Rocket Mortgage, only 47 percent of HOA residents think their HOA has made their community better, only two-thirds (64%) believe their HOA “honestly handles its finances,” and one in ten people nationwide who have an HOA cite the HOA itself as their main reason for moving.

How and why is this?

Louise and I have lived in five communities with HOAs in two different states. Three (including where we now live) were well managed, kept up the community, and set aside money from the dues every month for the inevitable future maintenance. I was on the board of one of them. The other two ran, essentially, a shell game or reverse Ponzi scheme, which led us to eventually quit those communities and move.

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I remember attending a board meeting in one of those “shell game” HOA communities we’d lived in. There were multiple common-area maintenance issues needing attention, but a group who called themselves “low-tax conservatives” had run the board for over a twenty years.

There was almost nothing in reserves, so maintenance had been continuously postponed until things hit a crisis level. Then they’d hit us all with a series of “special one-time assessments” ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to pay for the upkeep. They refused to raise the monthly HOA fee, referring to it as a tax, because, they said, they were “low-tax conservatives”; in fact, they were just cheapskates.

That HOA board had been, in the past and the present, stealing from future homeowners.

They did it so they could enjoy the community during the first 30 or so years — when maintenance costs were minimal — without setting aside money for the future, when things would rot or wear out and need replacement or upgrade.

For the first three decades, they were able to coast with $200/month in dues and no assessments; by the time we arrived when the units were pushing 35 years old, though, the assessments were hitting $3000 to $9000 a year, and, when the buildings’ roofs need repair (soon) it’ll be twice that amount or more.

Fortunately, once we saw the handwriting on that particular wall we were able to sell our condo and move to a well-run community. Americans, though, don’t have that option: Republicans have been running this same shell game or reverse Ponzi scheme against all of us (except the very rich) across the entire country ever since Reagan successfully pitched trickle-down economics to the nation in 1981.

If you’ve ever lived in one of these shell game HOA’s, you now perfectly understand Reaganomics and why it seems that America has deteriorated so badly over the past 40 years.

You could call it the disaster of pothole economics: all across America, roads, bridges, water systems, schools, and other vital public infrastructure have been underfunded and neglected ever since Reagan popularized the idea of “austerity” among Republicans.

In order to pay for the second most massive tax cut for the morbidly rich in history (Reagan cut the top tax bracket from 74% down to 25%), his administration cut spending on education, housing, roads and bridges, and pretty much every other aspect of America’s infrastructure. George W. Bush did the same thing, and Donald Trump tripled down on the scheme.

The result was a $51 trillion transfer of wealth — over a mere forty-three years — from the homes, retirement accounts, and savings of average working families into the money bins of the extremely wealthy. Thirty-four trillion of that transfer show up as our national debt, which was a mere $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) when Reagan first came into office and started this scam.

President Joe Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, ran the first administration of either party to significantly repudiate Reagan’s neoliberalism by injecting trillions into rebuilding our nation (over 35,000 projects) while raising taxes on rich people and corporations to pay for it.

The result was immediately visible, just like in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: we now have the best economy on planet Earth with unemployment lower than any time since the 1960s (and lower than any time in history for women, Blacks, and Hispanics). Inflation has been at or below 0% for the past two months and is annually running around 3% (Reagan never got inflation below 4.1% in his entire 8 years); all across America we’re putting our rural areas, towns, and cities back together.

For the past forty years, Republicans and their administrations have focused almost entirely on taking cash away from working class people and handing it off to the billionaires who own and finance their party. At the top of the list of ways they did this was a series of five tax cuts for the morbidly rich and big corporations adding up to over $30 trillion since 1981.

But they’ve also been cutting spending to compensate for their tax breaks for the billionaire class: They blocked extending the child tax credit this year, throwing millions of American children back into poverty. They’ve fought lifting the cap on Social Security taxes so people making over $168,600 will begin paying on all of their income (millionaires and billionaires currently pay only a tiny fraction of the percentage to support Social Security that the rest of us do).

Fully 100% of congressional Republicans voted against Biden’s Build Back Better program that’s now putting America back together and his American Rescue Plan that lifted millions out of poverty and put millions more back to work. They successfully blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act that would have penalized employers for wage discrimination based on gender; they’ve refused to expand Medicaid in almost a dozen Red states; they even filibustered an attempt to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10.

For the past forty-plus years, Republicans — just like these dysfunctional HOAs — have been stealing from America’s future; our infrastructure deficit alone is several trillion dollars, meaning Americans will be paying more in taxes to make up for all those decades of neglect.

Democrats want those tax increases to hit people earning over $400,000 a year; Republican tax proposals, on the other hand, mostly focus on increasing income taxes and fees on working class people while continuing or even expanding tax breaks for the very wealthy.

One of the “low tax” HOAs we used to live in, instead of raising their monthly fee or instituting an assessment, recently negotiated a million-dollar-plus 20-year loan with people’s properties as the collateral to fund painting and repairing serious rot on the buildings.

This should have been paid for with an increase in HOA fees twenty years ago, anticipating the future maintenance and upkeep needs.

But instead they kept the fee low, never built up a reserve, and are now borrowing from the bank. In other words, they’re continuing the all-too-common HOA board scam of requiring future generations to pay for current repairs, just like the GOP budget proposals we’ll see when they return from summer vacation in September will require future generations to pay for their past tax cuts.

It’s the equivalent of Reagan, Bush, and Trump jacking up the national debt to keep things glued together, forcing future generations to pay it off when the bill comes due, while their wealthy corporate funders rob us blind.

Homeowners across America are waking up to these toxic HOA boards, as social media sites for HOA members are forming and local homeowner uprisings are happening against boards, either replacing the board members or, in some cases, even suing them. Some states are even starting to require they build up reserves for future maintenance.

Hopefully, Americans will realize how successfully Republicans have inflicted this very same scam on voters and working class people over the past forty-plus years and vote the bums out this fall.

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Donald Trump took the first step to extinguishing the free and independent press in America yesterday, when federal judge and Bush-appointee Cecilia Altonaga ruled that his defamation lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos and ABC News could go forward.

She ruled that “a reasonable jury could conclude Plaintiff was defamed and, as a result, dismissal is inappropriate.” (emphasis hers)

Stephanopoulos had asked Republican Representative Nancy Mace how she could continue to support Trump when he had been “found liable for rape.” Trump is claiming that question libeled him and asking for damages that could run into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.

You’d think he doesn’t have a case. When a jury of his peers found in favor of E. Jean Carroll in her defamation case against Trump, Judge Lewis Kaplan noted:

“[T]he jury’s finding that Mr. Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”

Nonetheless, Judge Altonaga is letting Trump’s lawsuit against the reporter and news organization go forward. This is a very, very big deal that could signal the beginning of the end for a free and open press in America.

Trump is right now following a road blazed before him by multiple authoritarians and dictators who have taken over democracies in recent years.

When Vladimir Putin took over Russia in 1999, there was a thriving, diverse, and free press in the country. Today there is none; he largely used libel laws to destroy what had been there and replace it with a press landscape entirely owned by oligarchs friendly to him and state outlets.

When Viktor Orbán was elected Prime Minister of Hungary 14 years ago, there was also a flourishing free press in that nation. Today, every major press outlet — from TV to radio to newspapers and internet sites — exclusively sings his praises all day, every day and there’s functionally no meaningful opposition press within the country. All major media in Hungary are now owned by oligarchs beholden to Orbán.

Both men used Trump’s strategy to take down the media in their respective countries.

When Republicans visited Budapest, Hungary in 2022 to celebrate strongman Orbán’s “illiberal Christian democracy” model of government, he had some very specific advice about how to take over and hold a nation:

“Have your own media,” he said to cheers. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added, speaking of Putin-booster Tucker Carlson:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Both Putin and Orbán started by changing their nation’s libel laws, making it possible for the leaders and their cronies to sue any newspaper, radio, or TV station, blogger, social media user, or website that criticized them for libel.

It’s a much “softer” way of shutting up the press (and the public) than simply storming in and arresting journalists: instead, you drive them and their media outlets into bankruptcy so they self-censor and their outlets can then be acquired by friendly billionaires and turned into pro-government organs.

Russian libel penalties run into the millions of rubles, as Tanya Lokshina, senior Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch noted:

“These high fines can effectively suffocate smaller Russian media outlets and seem designed to increase self-censorship in mass media and online. … Freedom to criticize officials and expose their alleged wrongdoing is crucially important to fostering public debate and to holding officials accountable. The threat of criminal sanction to restrict speech strikes at the very core of Russia’s vibrant community of rights activists and independent journalists.”

Orbán, who visited Trump at Mar-a-Largo just a few weeks ago, followed a similar path, as he told state radio after independent journalists revealed his closest allies’ use of luxury yachts and private jets years ago. Threatening those journalists, he said:

“We do not attack anyone, we do not want to force anything on anybody, we do not say bad things about others, we do not smear people, we do not unnecessarily criticize anyone, we do not want to tell people what to do or how to live their lives, what decisions to make. But, when someone wants to do this to us, then we will protect our independence and the Hungarian way of thinking.”

Russia and Hungary are not, of course, the only countries that use libel laws to destroy opposition press and drive independent commentators, bloggers, social media users, and newsletter writers into bankruptcy.

Currently, such a strategy is employed by strongman leaders in Turkey, Egypt, Thailand, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, China, Iran, Belarus, Eritrea, Cuba, and Vietnam, among others.

Here in America, Florida was the first state where Republicans recently tried (unsuccessfully) to “open up” their state libel laws, in that case proposing legislation to make it criminally libelous for reporters to “cite an anonymous source.” More Red states will certainly follow as Orbán’s model is further embraced across the GOP.

And Donald Trump got the memo. After his win in court yesterday, he posted to his Nazi-infested social media site:

“A big win today in high Florida court against ABC fake News, and Liddle' George Slopadopolus. A powerful case! Before you know it, the fake news media will be forced by the courts to start telling the truth. This is a great day for our country. MAGA2024.”

He’s been threatening this for a while. When campaigning in February, 2016, he told attendees at a rally in Fort Worth, Texas:

“One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we’re certainly leading. I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws.
“So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”

As president, Trump tried to make it happen but didn’t then have the allies in Congress, the courts, and his administration willing to support destroying America’s free and independent press.

During an October, 2017 meeting in the White House with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau he shocked the media in attendance by openly contradicting our Constitution and the Founders of America by saying:

“It is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write.”

Three months later, he told his Cabinet that he wants to “take a strong look at our country’s libel laws,” which he called “a sham and a disgrace.” When media reports something bad about him, he said, the laws should be re-written or interpreted by the courts “so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts.”

He added, reading from prepared notes:

“Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace, and do not represent American values or American fairness. So we’re going to take a strong look at that. We want fairness. You can’t say things that are false, knowingly false, and be able to smile as money pours into your bank account ... I think what the American people want to see is fairness.”

And now, after seven years of pushing, Trump has finally found a federal judge who appears to agree with him. If pointing out that another judge had actually said that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll is defamation according to this conservative judge, can you imagine what could happen to those people who’ve called Trump a fascist or worse?

This case could well end up before the Supreme Court, currently dominated by authoritarian right-wingers, which should send shudders down the spines of every reporter, commentator, blogger, radio or TV host, social media participant, Substack writer, and news organization in America.

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Minnesota Governor Tim Walz this week blasted JD Vance for being a “grifter,” because Vance claimed he was some sort of a hillbilly who grew up in rural Appalachia when, in fact, he grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. Governor Walz, on the other hand, grew up in a town of 400 people with “24 kids in my graduating class” where “12 were cousins.”

In Vance’s autobiography Hillbilly Elegy he trash-talks his poor relatives, essentially accusing them of not being successful in life because of moral defects like laziness and addiction; he doubled down on these memes in his RNC speech, pointing out his own mother’s drug use.

In fact, they’re victims of Republican policies that make the rich richer and keep poor people poor; his mother’s addiction is a symptom, not a cause.

Vance, of course, “nobly” rose above it all with the help of our socialist GI Bill (which Republicans opposed) paying his way through Yale, and with help from rightwing billionaires who took Vance under their wings and helped him set up a hedge fund that made him fabulously rich.

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Often, the media refers to his life as a true “Horatio Alger story.”

When I was a kid, my dad was the national president of the book-collecting group TheHoratio Alger Society: Vance’s is a story right out of Alger’s books. Alger wrote stories about poor young men being lifted up into business success by wealthy older men, although he’s now out of favor because was busted as a gay predator. Even the Horatio Alger story itself, it turns out, was a grift.

Just like Vance’s career and his life story are a grift. Just like most all of Donald Trump’s failed businesses. Just like Nixon’s racist “law and order” grift. And Reagan’s tax-cut-for-the-rich “supply side” grift. And Bush and Cheney’s oil-grabbing Iraq “weapons of mass destruction” grift.

Republican policies, in fact, have been one long grift for more than half a century.

They’ve even turned our entire economy into a massive grift.

For example, when Louise and I moved to Washington, DC in 2008, we bought a Chris Craft Constellation 46-foot motorboat to live aboard (in the same marina where Joe Manchin keeps his much, much larger yacht) for the following seven years. It was built in 1986 — over 30 years earlier — and all the appliances were original and still worked, including the washer and dryer, stove, and refrigerator.

Try buying reasonably priced appliances today that will last 30 years: they don’t exist. After we moved back to Portland, we went through four toasters in the first five years, although one of my brothers still has my mom’s from the 1950s. And don’t get me started on dishwashers. Manufacturing has become a grift.

Largely thanks to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and other similar legislation, the entire American economy has become one giant grift.

Every company, it seems, is trying to hustle us. Pretending they care about customer service or making/selling quality products as a corporate mission statement has become a rude joke. It’s all a grift.

So why should it surprise us that our post-Reagan politics have also been dominated by grifters for 40+ years? And now two grifters are running for the presidency on the Republican ticket…

As I document in gruesome detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, since Reagan and Republicans on the Supreme Court adopted Robert Bork’s idea that monopolies were a sign of economic success rather than a crisis, everything has gotten more consolidated and, thus, more expensive. Reaganomics killed competition.

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US.

America is literally the only developed country in the world where families get wiped out and rendered homeless by medical bankruptcy simply because somebody got sick.

We’re the only developed country in the world with widespread college debt.

We’re the only developed country whose entire healthcare system rests on predatory for-profit health insurance companies, doctors’ offices and hospitals owned by hedge funds, and “pharmacy benefit managers.”

Similar metrics are found with virtually every other product or service category dominated by giant corporations. They’re all grifting us and getting rich doing it.

The average American family pays around $5,000 a year more for the general necessities of life than the average European, Japanese, South Korean, Canadian, Taiwanese, or Australian family. And things are steadily getting worse as monopolistic corporations and cartels tighten their grip on every American industry from banking to telecom to energy to food.

They even used inflation as an opportunity to grift, pushing prices up way above the actual inflation rate; corporate profits and executive pay in America over the last two years are higher than they’ve ever been in American history.

It’s all a grift, making stockholders and executives rich while impoverishing working people.

We pay more for pretty much everything and, as a result (along with stagnant wages from 40+ years of Reagan’s War On Unions), more than half of America is stuck in something close to (if not deep within) a type of debt-driven poverty from which escape is nearly impossible.

Social and economic mobility in America, the envy of the world for over a century, is today lower than in any other developed country.

The GOP grift that started when Reagan adopted Reaganomics and began destroying unions and imposing “austerity” took us from a nation where two-thirds of us had a middle-class lifestyle that let people buy a home and car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and retire comfortably with a pension to where only around 45 percent of us today qualify.

The largest cohort in America today is, like it was before the New Deal, the working poor. The Republican grift has already reversed over 50 years of progress, and now Trump and Vance want to double down.

Meanwhile, conservatives on the Supreme Court told usthat those same rip-off corporations are “persons with constitutional rights” and their “money is First Amendment-protected free speech.”

Thus, businesses and billionaires can now buy and sell politicians as easily as they buy and sell companies. Five conservatives on the Court — Clarence Thomas being the deciding vote after taking millions in naked bribes from billionaires with business before the Court — nailed down this new grift in 2010, over the loud and shocked objections and dissents of their colleagues, with their Citizens United decision.

So now corporations are people, and they can legally buy politicians and judges/justices. Most recently, the Republicans on the Court ruled that if a bribe is paid after the vote, legislation, or decision is rendered, it’s merely a “tip.” It’s a whole new grift.

But when corporations kill people — like PG&E did when they were convicted of burning 84 people to death in 2018 and faced charges of murdering 4 more people in 2020 — they don’t get the death penalty or even have to send their decision-making executives to prison. They just reduce slightly the payouts to their stockholders to cover the fines so they can keep on making money and, from time to time, killing more people.

And, up until recently, we’ve just been accepting these grifts.

Few California politicians dare stand up to PG&E any more than national politicians are willing to stand up to any other corporation: the resources of even middle-sized national and transnational corporations are more than adequate to destroy — or put and keep in office — any politician from a Town Clerk to the United States Senate. Just ask sellouts like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema.

A column in The Washington Post asked the question: “Why is Washington so dysfunctional?” The author interviewed two former members of Congress (a Democrat and a Republican) and a reporter whose beat is Congress.

Not a single one identified the obvious and simple answer to the question: the giant grift driven by money in politics, adopted by literally every Republican in Congress and more than a handful of Democrats, courtesy of Republicans on the Supreme Court and the last four Republican presidents.

It’s as if big-money grifting in politics has become so normalized since Reagan that it just doesn’t occur to people inside the beltway that it’s at the core of our problems.

The latest grift is Trump and Vance promising that they’ll “restore American greatness” when it was their Party and policies that stole America’s greatness, handing it off to the morbidly rich and the world’s largest corporations.

This is not complicated and, finally, voters have figured it out.

Joe Biden is the first American president to repudiate neoliberalism since Reagan adopted it and imposed it on America in 1980, writing NAFTA, creating the GATT, gutting unions, defunding education, blocking enforcement of antitrust laws, and cutting taxes on the morbidly rich.

Kamala Harris promises to continue Biden’s return to the policies of Keynesian economics, and the proof that Americans want it is obvious from the explosion of donations and support for her candidacy.

Finally, after two generations, the working class is beginning to climb out of the hole the GOP (and a few bought off “problem solver” Democrats) threw us into.

We’re on the verge of a new day in America. And it can’t come soon enough.

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President Biden has let go of his candidacy to focus on being president during this time of major international chaos. He also endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidential nomination, virtually guaranteeing she’ll head up the ticket.

There’s little chance that the Democratic Party’s candidate will be anybody other than Kamala Harris, and she’s certainly earned it.

President Biden put her in charge of the southern border and, Republican lies aside, illegal crossings are down dramatically (over 54% down, according to CBS News) and violent crime is at lows we haven’t seen in decades. (It peaked with Trump).

She’s met with world leaders and represented America brilliantly during a time when China, Russia, and Iran are moving aggressively against nearby democracies and here in America the GOP has embraced naked authoritarianism.

She’s helped shepherd through Congress some of the most consequential legislation in our lifetimes to backstop the middle class, fight climate change, and revitalize the American economy. She’s been beside Biden at most of history’s hinge points and honorably elevated her office, something nobody could say about, for example, Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, or Mike Pence (with one single exception).

Vice President Harris has been an outspoken advocate of women’s reproductive rights in the face of Republican efforts to turn the clock back to the 1950s; she’s been a champion for voting rights (particularly the John Lewis Freedom To Vote Act); and has a solid law-and-order background as San Francisco District Attorney and California’s elected Attorney General.

She worked side-by-side with President Biden to bring our economy back from the worst collapse since the Republican Great Depression, rebuild our infrastructure, support democracies around the world, extend affordable healthcare to millions more Americans, lower prescription drug prices, pass the first consequential gun safety law in three decades, and appoint the first African American woman to the Supreme Court. And the two of them brought us out of the worst pandemic since 1918; Covid is also now well under control, thanks in no small part to their efforts.

And she’s electable: imagine the debate between a former sex crimes prosecutor and a man a jury found had raped one woman and who’s been accused of sexual assault by another 23 women (including one 13 years old). Trump can imagine that and it terrifies him; he’s already talking about changing the terms of the debate, saying yesterday he may refuse to show up if it’s carried on “biased” CBS as planned.

Vice President Kamala Harris has earned both Joe Biden’s trust and his endorsement for President of the United States. I believe she’s also earned the support of most American voters, and the Party needs to solidify the ticket fast.

The GOP attacks have already started: the first Republican hit against this process came from House Speaker Mike Johnson, saying that the Democratic Party will now revert to “smoke-filled rooms” to decide our 2024 ticket because the Party has “abandoned democracy” in favor of appointment.

In fact, America is a “representative democracy” and always has been; we elect people to represent us and do the work of governing and decision-making on our behalf.

Along those lines, the delegates who will be deciding and ratifying the decision of this year’s ticket are almost all elected officials representing their constituents, and the few who are party insiders were mostly selected by people who we’ve elected.

Nobody smokes any more (at least in public), and the rooms where these decisions will be made are, by and large, filled with people we put there through elections to act on our behalf. Transparently. Publicly.

That is democracy.

With regard to President Biden and his decision to step down from the race, this is an historic example of a man putting his country ahead of his ego. Like George Washington voluntarily stepping down after his second term when no law or amendment required it and the majority of Americans wanted him to stay on, it shows the patriotism and integrity of the man.

I’ve known or met a lot of politicians (including Joe Biden) and an absolute truism is how addictive power can be; just ask the families of the five civilians and three police officers Donald Trump let die as he gleefully watched on TV the violence that he’d provoked trying to hang onto his own power. Joe Biden stepping aside is a rarity, and an extraordinarily honorable one.

President Biden stepping out of the race will also make it much easier for Democrats to point out Trump’s often-incoherent rambling, obsession with sharks and Hannibal Lecter, and advanced age.

On his CNN program yesterday, Fareed Zakaria pointed out that the parties had selected their candidates (like Democrats must do now) from the earliest days of our republic right up until the 1970s; in the last century-plus it happened at the nominating conventions.

Moving from the “smoke-filled rooms” to a primary system in the 1970s may have seemed like a more small-d democratic option than having elected delegates make the decision, but the reality we all see now is that it was precisely that decision that removed the guard rails of each party’s elders and let Democrat Donald Trump strut in and eat the GOP alive.

Going forward, hopefully both parties will reconsider the decision to hand the process over to voters without any sort of pre-selection process by the party itself. Both parties need to find and institute a middle ground between “smoke-filled rooms” and simple primaries.

The Republican Party’s seniormost people should have had the power to prevent a lifetime-registered-Democrat and notorious racist from entering their primary race; that Trump even got into the debates was a huge failure of this new post-1970s system which, has now destroyed that once-storied party.

That said, I well remember how, in 2016, Democratic Party insiders screwed Bernie Sanders so badly that DNC Acting Chair Donna Brazile wrote a chapter in her autobiography, apologizing to him (and, yes, his progressive populist message could have easily beat Trump that year).

While the Democratic Party hasn’t yet had to deal with a Trump type of demagogue (certainly Bernie doesn’t qualify!), I hope that whatever changes or tweaks that emerge from a reevaluation of our current primary system (if it happens) would respect voters and democracy, prevent a repeat of “Berniecide,” and also prevent an ultimately destructive person from ever again seizing a presidential candidacy.

There are many lessons to be learned from this year’s election. The main one right now, though, is that because the RNC, failed three times to protect America from a dictatorial madman, that job now falls to us.

We must unite quickly around our candidate and her and our Party’s pick for VP and hit the ground running by the end of this week.

Today, following both Vance’s and Trump’s speeches at the RNC, the future trajectory of America if they’re elected is pretty clear.

First, it’s important to acknowledge that this is no longer your (or my) father’s GOP. Vance is the pre-packaged, well-massaged “product” of a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who are enamored of the writings of Ayn Rand and David Koch’s Libertarian movement. Trump has made it clear he’s happy to go along with the Galt’s Gulch crowd, particularly if it makes him more money.

These men (they’re nearly all men) are revolutionaries with little regard for political history or norms. Think Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot, or Mussolini. They don’t want to tweak government; they want to burn it down and start it over from scratch. Rebuild it as a completely different system of governance.

They’re convinced that the post-1933 New Deal America is a mistake and, along with their allies on the Supreme Court, are dedicated to “deconstructing the administrative state” that came out of FDR’s reforms and the 20th century reinvention of the American system.

And they have a couple of models they seem committed to following. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is probably the most prominent; he’s already done pretty much everything on the list below, and what he hasn’t done he’s openly considered or will do to hang onto power.

If you’re not familiar with Orbán and how he’s transformed his nation into what he calls an “illiberal democracy,” I’ve written extensively about him here and here and here. And Trump rambled at length about him last night. Here is their plan, based in large part on Orbán’s model:

Donald Trump, on multiple occasions, has called for a reform of America’s libel laws along the lines of Orbán’s Hungary. Right now, as a result of both a long American tradition and the Supreme Court’s 1964 NY Times v Sullivandecision, public figures who feel they’ve been attacked or insulted (like politicians) can’t sue for libel unless they meet the really high bar of proving the person libeling them knew their comments were lies and pushed those lies in a “reckless” way.

When Peter Thiel was outed as gay by Gawker, the online celebrity tabloid, he funded Hulk Hogan’s invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against that publication (they published one of his sex videos) and its senior people: the court action wiped them out.

Trump wants to put this sort of thing on steroids.

Once the libel laws are loosened and ratified by at least 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court, Trump and his colleagues will be free to sue every newspaper, magazine, Substack writer, television station or network, radio station or network, and individual politician/writer/host/commentator/reporter he thinks has ever libeled or defamed him.

Orbán did this in Hungary and, as the traditional media went broke, one after another of his oligarch buddies bought them out of bankruptcy and continued to operate them.

As a result, the entire Hungarian media landscape, from the nation’s newspapers to radio, TV, and online publications, are today almost entirely like Fox “News”: full-time propaganda channels proclaiming the wonders and marvels of Orbán and his Fidesz party all day, every day.

Dissent has been silenced.

Orbán told the American CPAC conference in Budapest last year they should do the same in America when Republicans next seize control of the US government:

“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”

He added:

“Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.”

Once the media is under control, Trump has already told us that he intends to use the Department of Justice and the FBI to harass or imprison the people he feels have wronged him, ranging from the Biden family to Merrick Garland and the head of the FBI to individual politicians and journalists. His hit list reportedly includes publications like the New York Times and Raw Story.

As he told Sean Hannity on Fox “news:

“Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them…”

Those he doesn’t succeed in imprisoning, he’ll drive into bankruptcy by charging them repeatedly with crimes, launching IRS and other investigations, or stripping them of the professional licenses and credentials necessary to do their jobs: all that will require Trump’s victims to hire attorneys, which, Peter Navarro and Rudy Giuliani will tell you, can wipe you out if you’re not a billionaire.

Just this month, the six Republicans on the Supreme Court largely ruled in Trump v US that he’d be entirely within his rights to do such things, even if they clearly violate the current laws, so long as he calls them “official acts.”

In the last month of his presidency, then-President Trump issued an executive order (“Schedule F”) that essentially undid the traditional civil service and replaced career bureaucrats with political appointees singularly loyal to the president himself rather than their agencies, the law, or the country. (Biden reversed it.)

The Civil Service was a reform undoing the corrupt “spoils system” that President Andrew Jackson had put into place in the 1830s. Under the spoils system, the way to get a job with the federal government was to give the president or his friends a gift, do them a favor, or provide them with some other of the “spoils” of their position.

The spoils system led a frustrated speechwriter, Charles Guiteau, to assassinate President James Garfield in 1881 after Guiteau wrote a speech for him that Garfield not only refused to use but also refused to give Guiteau the speechwriting job he was seeking. As a result, in 1883 President Chester Arthur oversaw the implementation of the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which required government jobs be based on merit instead of political loyalty or bribes to the president and his friends.

Both Trump and Project 2025 call for dismantling the Pendleton Act and returning to Jackson’s spoils system via a new Schedule F. The result will be that every regulatory agency in America — the principle protection system for average working class Americans, along with our air, food, water, drugs, etc. — will be run purely for the interests of Trump’s and the GOP’s largest donors and their profits.

Trump and Vance have pulled a Reagan, falsely claiming they want to “reform” rather than gut, kill, or privatize Medicare, Social Security, etc. While Reagan wanted to privatize both programs, it was George W. Bush in 2003 who got the Medicare Advantage privatized Medicare scam into law. Trump’s Project 2025, however, is far more explicit.

Project 2025 calls for corporate for-profit insurance to replace Medicare as the default enrollment option when people turn 65 or otherwise qualify for the program and to voucherize Medicaid with work requirements and lifetime caps on the program (which will wipe out old people’s ability to use it for nursing homes).

Expect most federal “welfare” programs, from housing supports to food stamps to educational and tuition assistance for low-income people to be turned into block grants to the states, which will, over time, wither to nothing through repeated budget cuts and “reforms.”

If Republicans can take control of the Senate as well as the White House next year, expect a massive effort to encourage sitting judges to retire (including financial incentives) so they can further pack the entire federal court system with rightwingers in the mold of Aileen Cannon and Clarence Thomas.

The 1873 Comstock Act, also known as “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use,” is, as Clarence Thomas, Josh Hawley, and Sam Alito have recently pointed out, still on the books.

It criminalizes transporting, via the mail or private carrier (UPS, FedEx, etc.), any drug, instrument, or device that can be used to produce an abortion, as well as all forms of pornography. A strict interpretation could read it to also outlaw birth control. (It was used for half a century to outlaw condoms).

While it hasn’t been enforced for decades, both Project 2025 and multiple Republicans — including JD Vance — have demanded that the department of Justice enforce it, as The Washington Post documented in their article this week titled, “Vance urged DOJ to enforce Comstock Act, crack down on abortion pills.”

The Obergefell decision, which legalized gay marriage, and the Lawrence decision, which decriminalized intimacy between same-sex couples, were both grounded in the same read of the Constitution’s protections for individual privacy as the one that animated Roe v Wade.

Sam Alito wrote the decision in Dobbs that overturned that interpretation altogether, leading Clarence Thomas to suggest in his concurring opinion that the Court’s next targets should include gay marriage and the right to possess birth control.

In 1947, overriding the veto of President Harry Truman, a Republican congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which gave individual states the authority to override union protections in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (aka The Wagner Act). Republicans claimed gutting union protections was a way of protecting “the right to work” and that label has stuck over the years.

Those states that have adopted right to work laws are almost exclusively GOP controlled, and rarely have fewer than 4-5 percent of their workers in unions (and most of those are federal government unionized workers or teachers). A top priority of the billionaires who own the Republican Party has been, for decades, the imposition of the right to work for fewer laws at the national level, a new-and-improved version of Taft Hartley to finally destroy the union movement altogether.

Donald Trump has promised to assemble a national police force of sorts that will go door-to-door across the country to hunt down an estimated 11 million “illegals” who are in the United States without documentation. For-profit prison companies will build massive detention facilities, and anybody who looks Black, Asian, or Hispanic but was born at home or lost their birth certificate and so can’t prove citizenship can expect to quickly end up in one of Trump’s new concentration camps.

After the 2025 version of Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback(which deported about 1.3 million people, including an estimated tens of thousands of Latino American citizens who couldn’t immediately find their documentation) is finished, Trump will have a massive armed police force which, like his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, that he can turn on Americans who he says are “unpatriotic.”

All he’ll need do is tweak our sedition laws to expand the definitions of actions that are “intended to overthrow the government of the United States,” which he has also already proposed, to begin throwing politicians and reporters in prison. Easy peasy.

The Libertarian tech billionaires who sponsor Trump and Vance believe these and other “free market” and “individual responsibility” changes to a newly-gutted American system will encourage “lazy” people to get off their butts and off to work while it gets “government interference” out of their businesses.

And if the government no longer has to pay “welfare benefits,” including Medicare and Social Security, then billionaires’ taxes can be further reduced (as Trump has already promised) as an extra bonus.

For a more comprehensive view of Trump’s and Vance’s plans for our country check out the many great summaries, including Project 2025 Takedown, How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life, and Project 2025: A Trump Dictatorship.

These people are dead serious. Get ready!

—Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

Marjorie Taylor Greene told Republicans at the RNC this week that Donald Trump “will make us wealthy.”

What’s she really saying? And who is “us”?

A lot of words get thrown around to describe what we can expect with a MAGA Republican administration at full strength. From “authoritarian” to “fascist” to “Christian Nationalist” and worse. However, most of these words and phrases have — for most Americans — no specific meaning and so are often just considered either a cheap slur or hyperbole.

But the reality is that the MAGA wing of the GOP (now fully in control of the Party) and the rightwing billionaires who fund the think tanks and networks that keep it alive do have a very specific idea about how America should be governed.

READ: R.I.P. GOP

And there’s nothing new or modern about it.

It’s the second-most ancient form of governance humanity knows (behind democracy), described in detail in works both modern and ancient, dating all the way back to ancient Sumeria, China, Mesoamerica, and Europe; some countries incorporate it into their official names to this day.

It’s called “kingdom.”

Most people, when they think of a kingdom, think of a king: a ruler with absolute power over his subjects. Absolute immunity for all official acts. A monarch accountable to nobody except his own whims. A man who must be obeyed under all circumstances, lest dreadful consequences befall those who defy him.

And, of course, six Republicans on the Supreme Court just this month granted that very sort of power to the American presidency, an abomination completely at odds with the form of government our Founders and Framers created and generations of Americans fought and died to preserve for us, our children, and our grandchildren.

But kingdoms are also economic systems. In many regards, in fact, the economics of a kingdom are more essential to understanding how power is acquired, wielded, and held over time by the sovereign and their class — in defiance of the majority of the people — than any other single factor.

In a kingdom, like in a democratic republic, there are essentially three economic classes: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. They’re organized quite differently in these two systems, though, as history tells us.

For example, when Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol he introduced us to two of those three economic classes. Ebenezer Scrooge was part of the United Kingdom’s small middle class, made up of doctors, lawyers, and small business owners. It was probably less than 3-5 percent of England’s working population, while the working poor were around 95 percent.

Dickens draws a contrast between middle-class small businessman Scrooge, with his single employee, and the mayor of London, who drew his role in society from wealth and nobility (the 1 percent of the day), when he wrote:

“The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's household should…”

In that same paragraph, Dickens describes the poor-working-class tailor’s wife as “lean” (the result of hunger) and two chapters later describes the poor-working-class lighthouse keepers thus:

“But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be...”

We’ve been reading, seeing, and hearing that iconic story for most of our lives, but few Americans ever realize how dedicated Dickens was to describing life in a kingdom where the ability to rise into the middle class was narrowly circumscribed and the working class was virtually 100% “the working poor.”

Public schools as we understand them were non-existent; only the tiny middle-class and very wealthy could send their children to attend quality private schools or university.

Sickness condemned a working-class-poor family to lifelong debt, as Dickens told us how Tiny Tim, who “bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame,” kept his family in such deep poverty that his father wore “his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable…”

Not only was there no minimum wage in the United Kingdom in Dickens’ 1840s; there were maximum wage laws designed specifically to prevent working poor people from rising up through the economic ranks into the middle class.

The inability to repay debt meant prison and forced labor (Dickens’ own father had been sentenced to a debtor’s prison when Charles was a child), unions were non-existent, and only the wealthy had any access whatsoever to political power or any say in the direction the nation would take.

Meanwhile, the Lord Mayors, the members of the extended royal family, and the fabulously wealthy — the one percent of the Victorian era — lived lives of opulence and wretched excess.

While they didn’t have the ability to buy multiple 700-foot yachts or shoot themselves into outer space on giant penis-shaped rockets, they certainly had the equivalent of that time.

And they rarely paid taxes. As English economist Arthur Young wrote in 1792:

“The nobility and clergy have for centuries been exempted from taxation... The nobles and clergy, by their privileges and exemption from taxes, threw all the weight of the state expenses on the people.”

This week the Republican Party is endorsing a billionaire for president and a multi-multi-millionaire hedge fund guy — the protégé of another billionaire — for vice president. If Trump and Vance are elected, under the rules defined by Republicans on the Supreme Court they’ll become our first king and king-in-waiting.

To accomplish this, their platform and other efforts include extending and increasing massive tax cuts for the very rich, gutting public schools, purging the military and academia of the “radical left,” and throwing over 10 million people into concentration camps.

Forty years of Reaganomics have taken our middle class from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to fewer than half of us today; Republicans want to further impoverish working class people by gutting unions, crushing small entrepreneurial businesses through blocking enforcement of anti-trust laws, and eliminating minimum wage laws altogether.

The working poor were fewer than a third of us when Reagan came into office; 43 years of Reaganomics later, the working poor are more than half of Americans. And if Trump and Vance get their way, we’ll be heading even faster toward Dickens’ 95 percent.

Republicans are so dedicated to keeping working class people poor and locked into their social strata they even went all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent President Biden from lessening the burden of student debt, a problem that literally does not exist in any other developed nation in the world.

Similarly, last year there were about a half-million families destroyed by medical debt bankruptcy across the entire developed world; nearly every one of those was here in the US. When President Biden proposed simply blocking credit agencies from downgrading families with medical debt, Republicans immediately opposed his effort.

When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery — opening the door to billionaires like Musk giving $45 million a month to Trump’s election efforts — they guaranteed that what remains of our democracy (we’re the only developed country in the world that allows such corruption) finds itself under continuous assault.

As Thomas Jefferson (who died in bankruptcy) wrote about the monetary obsessions of the morbidly rich to John Adams (lifelong member of the middle class) on January 24, 1814:

“You might as well, with the sailors, whistle to the wind, as suggest precautions against having too much money. We must scud then before the gale, and try to hold fast, ourselves, by some plank of the wreck.”

Call it what you want, the GOP is nakedly zealous about turning America from a democratic republic into a kingdom. And the rightwing billionaires and their corporations are doing everything they can to make it happen.

Our last chance to rescue democracy may well come this November. Vote!

READ: R.I.P. GOP

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

A lot happened at the RNC yesterday, but the most telling moment predicting the future of America’s conservative movement and the GOP was when Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was soundly and loudly booed by the assembled delegates and participants, and then JD Vance was selected for VP.

It was the death knell of the old order, the Republican Party that has held a relatively consistent set of values since the 1880s, and the beginning of something entirely new.

Emphasizing this, Donald Trump picked Vance, a man who — like Trump — no longer embraces the traditional conservative values and policy positions of the GOP, as his vice president.

By ignoring what could be called the Nikki Haley/Mitt Romney/Ronald Reagan wing of the party in favor of this pugilistic heir to the politics of Joe McCarthy, Trump signaled he believes he’s now strong enough that he can ignore entirely the orthodox GOP and take both the party and our country down an authoritarian road we haven’t traveled since the days of John C. Calhoun’s Nullification Crisis.

READ: Associated Press issues warning about iconic Trump assassination attempt photo

I grew up in a traditional Republican household. My dad, who had a good union job in a tool-and-die shop, was an enthusiastic Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Reagan Republican and I well remember the values and policy positions that animated the GOP from that era until Trump’s hostile takeover in 2016:

— Traditional Republicans supported the American system of elections, encouraged voter registration drives (my mom volunteered as an election worker for decades), and were proud of their tradition — dating back to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War — of supporting the right of all American (men) to vote regardless of creed or color.

Trump and Vance, on the other hand, embrace Trump’s oily, disingenuous lies about the 2020 election being “stolen” from him, endorse purging Black and college-town voters from state rolls by the millions, and criminalizing voter registration efforts.

— Traditional Republicans supported an expansion of trade relations with other nations, arguing that the “principle of comparative advantage” would benefit consumers and that countries that trade with each other are less likely to go to war with each other.

Trump and Vance, on the other hand, want to put massive tariffs — paid for by American consumers — on imported products while embracing trade wars and xenophobic protectionism.

— Traditional Republicans supported — at least rhetorically — balanced budgets and fiscal sanity, historically arguing that taxes and expenditures should at least come close to balancing each other out.

Trump and Vance, on the other hand, were just fine with Donald Trump adding $8.4 trillion to the national debt, more than any other non-wartime president did in four years in the entire history of the United States.

— Traditional Republicans supported rights to privacy and personal autonomy. “Big government” that would insert itself into the private lives of citizens was anathema. They welcomed the gay Log Cabin Republicans.

Trump and Vance, on the other hand, support draconian bans on abortion and are pushing to end Americans’ rights to birth control, gay marriage, and the ability to check out and read the books you want from your local library. JD Vance says women in abusive relationships should not be allowed to get a divorce, and even children who are raped and impregnated should be forced at gunpoint to carry their pregnancy to term.

— Traditional Republicans helped build the American public school system and were proud that by the end of Eisenhower’s presidency it was the envy of the world.

Trump and Vance, on the other hand, want to subsidize private, for-profit and church schools for the upper-middle-class and rich people while ghettoizing the remaining public schools for poor and working-class people.

— Traditional Republicans endorsed the concept of America as a worldwide example of democracy (Reagan’s “shining city on the hill”) and “peace through strength.”

Trump and Vance cheer when Trump hangs his head and trashes the American military and intelligence agencies while humbly deferring to Vladimir Putin. They’re fine with him telling Russia and China they can “do whatever they want” to democratic nations and NATO members.

— Traditional Republicans supported nations’ rights to national sovereignty and joined WWII to push back against Germany’s seizure of independent European nations. My dad volunteered for WWII as soon as he graduated high school; traditional Republicans were eager to defend democracies and never would have thought of draft-dodging five times with purchased X-rays of somebody else’s bone spurs.

Trump and Vance cheer Donald Trump’s promise to turn Ukraine over to Russia, ending the war “in one day,” and want to abandon the rest of Europe to Putin’s tender mercies. The news story echoing around the world today is: “Both Trump and Vance want to give Ukraine to Putin.“

— Traditional Republicans defended America’s institutions of law enforcement; the FBI, in fact, has never had a Democrat at its helm in its entire history.

Trump and Vance supported congressional Republicans when they voted to defund the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies and booed Capitol Police officers when they showed up at the Pennsylvania statehouse. They defend January 6th traitors who attacked the Capitol police officers, putting over 140 of them in the hospital and killing three.

— Traditional Republicans demanded high moral standards from their presidents.

Vance has embraced a man who cheated on each of his three wives, who’s been credibly accused of rape by over 20 women (one 13 years old), and found to have actually raped E. Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers…twice. Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was legendary, he brags about being able to “grab them by the pussy” whenever he feels like it, and he publicly boasted about walking into the dressing rooms of teen and pre-teen girls when he owned that pageant.

— Traditional Republicans honored “law and order,” keeping your word, and integrity in business relations; they had nothing but disgust for con men, hustlers, and lawbreakers.

Vance is now enthusiastic about a man who paid $25 million to make whole people who’d been conned and ripped-off by his fake university, was fined hundreds of millions for business and tax fraud, who stole (along with his son Eric) from a children’s cancer charity, had six bankruptcies leaving creditors holding the bag for billions, and has been sued over 3000 times for refusing to pay his bills to small businesses, employees, and independent contractors.

— Traditional Republicans embraced the right of everybody to practice the religion of their upbringing or choice, and honored politicians who live their faith by church membership and behavior consistent with the teachings of Jesus and the prophets.

Trump and Vance are fine with the fact that Donald Trump has never attended church, brags that he has never done anything that would require him to ask God for forgiveness, and hangs out with religious hustlers who are most interested in getting subsidies and payments that Trump can facilitate from government.

— Traditional Republicans like Ronald Reagan supported rational gun control policies.

Trump and Vance are just fine with an America where the leading cause of childhood deaths is bullets. They embrace armed militias whose members often openly fantasize about killing their neighbors in a second Civil War.

— Traditional Republicans were environmentalists and wanted to protect wild spaces and species. Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into existence.

Trump and Vance are “drill, baby, drill” and say they don’t believe that the climate is changing, at least as long as the fossil fuel industry keeps pouring money into their nonprofits and campaigns.

John Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson for his vice president because he needed Texas; Trump doesn’t need Vance’s Ohio. Al Gore picked Joe Lieberman to balance his ticket both ideologically (Lieberman was far more conservative) and religiously; Trump and Vance are both “Christian” nationalists.

The only reason Trump picked Vance was because Vance will be a brutal enforcer for Trump’s most autocratic tendencies.

He’ll delight in ripping mothers from their babies like Trump did, in moving 11 million asylum seekers into concentration camps, and in stripping Americans of their rights under the Constitution in the face of Trump’s promised declarations of insurrection and emergency.

Traditional Republicans like my dad wouldn’t recognize today’s GOP. As Liz Cheney posted to X: “Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t – overturn an election and illegally seize power. The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution.”

JD Vance, now the Republican candidate for vice president, is fully supportive of every aspect of Donald Trump’s cons and nakedly anti-American and pro-dictator policies.And he’s the favored candidate of most rightwing billionaires who’ve expressed a preference.

That should tell us — along with traditional Republicans and independent swing voters — exactly what sort of future the two of them have in mind for us and for what remains of the GOP.

NOW READ: How Donald Trump turned America into a seething cauldron of political violence

Historian Douglas Brinkley told the story on CNN Sunday morning about how after President Ronald Reagan was shot, when he woke up in the hospital, he told a friend nearby that the experience had transformed him, that he was now going to dedicate his life to peace.

Not only did he not once blame the shooting on Democrats; Reagan instead largely followed through on that promise, Brinkley said, spending the rest of his presidency trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons. He later worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev trying — successfully — to deescalate tensions between the US and the USSR.

“Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war,” Reagan later told a confidant.

A few days after he left the hospital, Reagan wrote a personal note to then-Soviet leader Brezhnev saying he’d like to reach out and work together for “a meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace.”

Don’t expect that this attempt on his life will similarly “awaken” Donald Trump. Already, his surrogates are using the opportunity to demonize — and shut up — Democrats.

READ: 'God spared our great leader': Trump rally shooting spurs religious MAGA mania

Republican Senator and VP wannabee JD Vance was one of the first:

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

In other words, Democrats damn well better stop calling Trump and the people who support him authoritarians or point out the parallels between their policies and rhetoric and those of Nazis unless they want to be blamed for the actions of a random 20-year-old madman with the classic “bullied loner” profile of a school shooter wanting to die in a blaze of glory.

What an authoritarian thing to do. And it’s intentional: the goal is to blow up the re-election plan that Joe Biden laid out in a speech just a few days before the shooting: to focus on Trump’s violent rhetoric, violent provocations on January 6th, and his years-long embrace of authoritarian violence.

They’re trying, in other words, to silence Democrats. To shut down the Biden campaign’s sharpest weapon against Trump and his neofascist rightwing MAGA movement.

Republican Senator and fellow VP wannabee Tim Scott also got the message, perhaps directly from the campaign or maybe he just saw an opportunity on his own to turn up the heat; he jumped right in:

“Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”

Republican Senator Ron Johnson, on CNN with Jake Tapper Sunday morning, blamed “Critical Race Theory” for the shooting, saying that the study of historic anti-Black racism in American schools was responsible for the attempt on Trump.

Marjorie Taylor Greene took the opportunity to suggest Democrats are trying to start a second American Civil War, as if people on the left are buying assault weapons and organizing into militias:

“The left wants a civil war. They have been trying to start one for years. These people are sick and evil.”

Democrats, in other words, damn well better shut up right now about Trump and MAGA’s violent words and memes. Condemning Trump and the militias and racists who promote him is now off-limits: that’s rhetoric that will lead to a “civil war.”

Georgia Republican Congressman Mike Collins went straight for the jugular, tweeting simply:

“Joe Biden sent the orders.”

In that, he’s echoing Donald Trump’s prior claims that when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for the top-secret documents he’d stolen from the White House, President Biden was trying to use the opportunity to have the FBI assassinate him. Trump’s exact statement on Truth Social was that Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out.”

Trump is now claiming it was “God alone” who kept him safe from death; so far, it looks and sounds like Trump, instead of choosing Reagan’s path to peace, will be claiming martyrdom and directing all the attention to himself. Just two months ago, in fact, Substack author Rohn Kenyatta warned of a scenario very much like this in his excellent LookingNWords newsletter.

Many hope that Trump and his followers won’t continue to use this attempt on his life to blame Democrats for political violence in America, although social media is already afire with such memes.

As noted, the goal of Republican efforts now will be directed to getting the media to condemn Democrats whenever they point out the GOP’s embrace of violence, from January 6th to Trump joking about the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi to the “very fine people” in Charlottesville.

If they choose to take the fascist response to a political bloodletting rather that Reagan’s de-escalation response, there’s a well-trod path — laid out in the book Trump’s first wife said was on his bed-stand for years — that I very much hope Trump doesn’t choose to follow.

Ninety-eight years ago this month, the echo of a similar martyrdom first appeared in Germany, an event I’m connected to by only two degrees of separation.

On July 4, 1926, the Blutfahne, or “blood flag,” was unveiled at the second party congress of Germany’s National Socialists.

When Hitler had earlier led a march to overthrow the government of the state of Bavaria, storming the Munich capitol building with a mob, the police stopped them before they were able to get to the governor or any of the legislators; two people were shot by police and one, Andreas Bauriedl, knocked over and fell on a swastika flag where he died of his gunshot to the stomach.

The bloodied flag became a sacred relic for that authoritarian movement. They carried it to all their major political events; over time it took on, followers believed, a “spiritual vibration.” They called it the Blutfahne, or “blood flag.”

My mentor, Gottfried Müller, told me a story that I relate in the book I wrote about him, that, at a 1930s Nazi rally, he’d been among a group of young draftees who were led up to the stage to salute Hitler and touch the Blutfahne.

(Müller later renounced Nazism and, immediately after the war, spent years traveling to German churches and civic halls with a Hasidic rabbi, Avram Pollak, preaching pacifism; he later started a series of peace-based nonprofits around the world, which is how I first met him. I helped start Salem (“Salem means ‘Peace’”) programs in the US, Israel, Colombia, Uganda, and a half-dozen other countries throughout the 1980s.)

Flag consecration — using a flag, particularly one that was bloodied in battle — is a European military tradition that dates back to at least the 10th century. For example, a “blood flag” was famously used to lead a battle in Germany in the Talschaft (forest canton) of Schwyz in 1240.

There’s even an American variation. In April 1871, former Union Army General and then-Congressman Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts gave a speech condemning the Ku Klux Klan. Rightwingers associated with the Klan claimed that he had waived the bloody shirt of a Black voting rights “carpetbagger” they had killed — which is where the phrase, “Waving the bloody shirt!” comes from.

Will Trump’s authoritarian movement continue with their pattern of echoing fascist and authoritarian language and behaviors (“poisoning the blood,” “vermin,” referring to Democrats as “the radical left”) by exploiting this attempt on his life?

Will there be a flag, shirt, or other relic touched with Trump’s blood or that of the supporter who died that becomes their movement’s Blutfahne?

Trump has already laid the foundation for such an effort: After his arrest in Georgia on charges of trying to steal the 2020 election, he had the suit he wore cut into tiny squares which were then sold online as if they were sacred relics.

As The New York Times noted last December:

“According to the NFT INT website, the suit is ‘priceless.’ There are enough tiny suit pieces for 2,024 buyers (because, you know, election year), and enough tie pieces for 225.
“In other words, it’s not just a suit. It’s a font of potential relics — one that positions the mug shot suit as the most important suit of Mr. Trump’s career so far, rather than, say, Mr. Trump’s inauguration suit.”

We’ll find out this week — as Republicans meet today in Milwaukee to begin their coronation of Trump — whether the GOP he now controls will try to elevate his previous calls for “revenge” and “retribution” against Democrats, using this incident as a touchstone. Or if they’ll use this attempt to try to use the media to block Biden’s re-election strategy of pointing out Trump’s own rhetoric.

Given how Trump, just four months ago, promoted on Truth Social an image of President Biden hogtied in the back of a pickup truck with a bullet in his forehead, this seems the most likely outcome, suggesting he’ll use the attempt on his life to increase his already-violence-drenched rhetoric.

Remember, back in 2016, Trump explicitly called for his “Second Amendment people” to take out Hillary Clinton before the election, saying:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.”

There’s speculation in the media that Trump will shift from his previous combative rhetoric to a Reaganesque call for national unity. He already has the GOP base, now fervent in the wake of this attempt on his life; his goal now will be to draw in swing voters “in the middle” by sounding reasonable.

Such a strategy would also help the GOP effort to neuter Biden’s attacks on Trump’s record and decade of promotion of violence.

So, will they use this event as an opportunity to renounce Vance’s, Greene’s, and Scott’s rhetoric, to repudiate authoritarianism, and to return their party to Reagan’s post-shooting embrace of bipartisanship and world peace?

Or are they going to continue driving the GOP down the fascist road by exploiting this event to both “wave the bloody shirt” and shut up Democrats?

Will the media jump on the bandwagon and condemn Democrats and Biden for normal campaign rhetoric while continuing to normalize Trump’s violent past?

Will Biden and his campaign — and progressive media — be cowed by the phony GOP calls to “tone down the rhetoric”?

NOW READ: Supreme Court’s MAGA majority wants us to burn

Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and Project 2025 have some very specific plans for nationally resetting the legal status of half the American population, and they’re using religion and “sin” to justify their bizarre imposition of 18th century values.

They explicitly want to reverse the status of women’s legal, workplace, marital, and social equality and return to a time when biblical law dictated that men ran everything from the household to business to governance and law.

One key to women being able to play leadership and workplace roles has been their ability to regulate their own fertility, from access to birth control, the morning-after pill, and abortion.

READ: WTF are the Democrats doing?

By enforcing the Comstock Act — which is still on the books, as Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and numerous other Republicans keep reminding us — they will be able to ban the shipment of anything, from drugs to surgical devices, that can be used to produce an abortion. This could even end most hospital-based abortions by essentially outlawing the equipment needed to perform them.

As Project 2025 proclaims on p. 594 of their Mandate for Leadership for the next Republican administration:

“Announcing a Campaign to Enforce Criminal Prohibitions in 18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462 [the Comstock Act] Against Providers and Distributors of Abortion Pills That Use the Mail. Federal law [the Comstock Act] prohibits mailing ‘[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.’ Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute. The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law….”

The second key is to give men the power to challenge women who want a divorce. As Senator JD Vance said in 2021:

“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”.

Republican legislators in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas have already proposed eliminating no-fault divorce in those states, and the trend is picking up steam among GOP politicians nationwide.

Multiple Project 2025 partners, including the powerful and influential American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has helped introduce thousands of pieces of state and federal legislation, are explicit about this goal, as Media Matters for America noted:

“The American Legislative Exchange Council proposed a piece of legislation dubbed the “Marriage Contract Act,” which would have eliminated no-fault divorce. [Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC Exposed, 2/13/17]”

The consequences could be dramatic and deadly for women, as The Guardian recently explained:

“Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the [no-fault divorce] laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.”

Republicans nationwide are calling for a reversal of the women’s rights movement dating all the way back to Abigail Adams’ imploring her husband John to “remember the ladies” at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 through today, and are not shy about it.

For example, Federal District Judge Michael Kacsmaryk, 46, was appointed to the federal bench by Donald Trump. A Republican activist and religious fundamentalist, he’s said that “so-called marriage equality” has put America “on a road to potential tyranny” and reflects a “complete abuse of rule of law principles.”

As The Washington Post noted, Kacsmaryk has argued that:

“The sexual revolution ushered in a world where an individual is ‘an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology’ and where ‘marriage, sexuality, gender identity and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.’”

Kacsmaryk, the judge who tried to outlaw mifepristone nationally (which the Supreme Court will almost certainly decide on next year) is part of a substantial movement within the GOP to use religion to roll back the rights and status of women.

Because their “beliefs” are grounded in their religion and they believe that women who get abortions or use some types of birth control (IUDs, morning-after pills, etc.) are committing the ultimate sin, murder, they want to see these sinning women suffer for their “crimes.”

Like people who love the death penalty (and in two states now state legislators have called for the death penalty for women who get abortions), they want to be able to torture them and watch them suffer; they want them to experience humiliation, and feel mortification for their sin of rejecting a pregnancy initiated by a man who was ordained by their god to be their master and the head of their household.

Torturing women for religious reasons is nothing new for American theological zealots.

Louise and I used to live just a short drive from Dover, New Hampshire, the fourth-largest city in the state, near the Maine border and the Atlantic seacoast. Generations ago, rightwing politicians and preachers were enforcing social control, much like the GOP’s forced birthers are trying to do today.

John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “How the Women Went from Dover” tells the tale of three young women who dared to challenge that day’s most powerful religious men, that early generation of the people driving the most extreme parts of what today has morphed into the forced birth movement.

Whittier’s poem begins:

The tossing spray of Cocheco’s fall
Hardened to ice on its rocky wall,
As through Dover town in the chill, gray dawn,
Three women passed, at the cart-tail drawn!

The three women were Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose, and their crime was adhering to and promoting female-tolerant Quaker beliefs in a rabidly rightwing town.

This so enraged the minister of Dover’s Congregational church, John Reyner, that he and church elder Reverend Hatevil Nutter (yes, that was his real name) lobbied the crown magistrate, Captain Richard Walderne, to have them punished for their challenge to Reyner’s and Nutter’s authority.

It was a bitter New England winter when Walderne complied, ordering the three women stripped naked and tied to the back of a horse-drawn cart by their wrists, then dragged through town while receiving ten lashes each.

As Whittier wrote:

Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip
And keener sting of the constable’s whip,
The blood that followed each hissing blow
Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.

A local man, George Bishop, wrote at the time what he witnessed:

“Deputy Waldron caused these women to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and tied to a cart, and after a while cruelly whipped them, whilst the priest stood and looked and laughed at it.”

It was a start, from Reverend Reyner’s point of view, but hardly enough to scare the women of the entire region from which he drew his congregation. So, he got the young women’s punishment extended to 11 nearby towns over 80 miles of snow-covered roads, all following the same routine.

So into the forest they held their way,
By winding river and frost-rimmed bay,
Over wind-swept hills that felt the beat
Of the winter sea at their icy feet.

The next town was Hampton, where the constable decided that just baring them above the waist wasn’t enough. As Sewall’s History of the Quakers records:

“So he stripped them, and then stood trembling whip in hand, and so he did the execution. Then he carried them to Salisbury through the dirt and the snow half the leg deep; and here they were whipped again.”

As Whittier wrote in his poem:

Once more the torturing whip was swung,
Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.
“Oh, spare! they are bleeding!” a little maid cried,
And covered her face the sight to hide.

Whipping, beating, stoning, hanging, nailing, being pilloried (publicly clamped to a post through neck and wrist holes, often naked and sometimes for days at a time), dragging, burning, branding, and dozens of other techniques were employed by religious and government authorities in the early American colonies to enforce religious thought and behavior, particularly against women.

As Whittier wrote:

If her cry from the whipping-post and jail
Pierced sharp as the Kenite’s driven nail,
O woman, at ease in these happier days,
Forbear to judge of thy sister’s ways!

For the entirety of “civilized” human history — in country after country, culture after culture, religion after religion — crusaders for Zeus, Ra, Thor, Odin, Aphrodite, Venus, JHWH, Shiva, Rama, Krishna, Jesus, Quetzalcoatl, Mohamed, Ceridwen, Xpiacoc, Ishtar, and Amen (among hundreds of others) have, at various times, punished, tortured, and even killed women who refused to acknowledge their male gods and the rules of their patriarchal religious and political systems.

— Adherents to radical Islam from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to The Philippines today require women to cover most all of their bodies, and delight in publicly whipping and even beheading females who won’t comply.

— Fundamentalist Hindus in India today burn women to death if they’ve defied religious authorities or the patriarchs of their families.

— For over 1000 years, Christian fundamentalists have — as Whittier documents — tortured, hung, impaled, and burned to death women who defied their male ministers’ religious mandates.

What we’re seeing today in these attempts to regulate women’s behavior by the GOP is a simple extension of religious fundamentalism and patriarchy that goes back as far as ancient Samaria.

This lust for domination is really about wielding political power under the guise of religion.

Again, this is nothing new. It’s an ancient story that keeps echoing through history and Trump, the GOP, and Project 2025 are committed to reviving.

Here in America today, it’s part of a larger war on “uppity women,” non-whites, non-fundamentalist-Christian people, and gender minorities.

Which is why it’s so clear that bringing back enforcement of the Comstock Act via Project 2025 is not about the safety of women. It’s not even about reducing the number of abortions.

It’s about control, power, and their assertion that an angry Christian god has told them they are uniquely suited to interpret his scripture in a political context. They, and they alone, can choose to embrace the punitive parts of Christianity and ignore the empathetic and loving parts of it.

Those sadists want to shame women who’ve rejected their religious beliefs and gone on to get abortions, seek divorces, or participate in the workplace or government. Who have defied their religiously-justified patriarchal political authority.

They want to publicly humiliate women, harass them, and teach them a lesson about who’s really in charge.

And, if the adjudicated rapist Donald Trump takes the White House this fall, they’ll be able to gleefully do it — like Reverend Nutter — under the sanction and protection of the law.

NOW READ: Fearmongering? A troubling aspect behind John Roberts' presidential immunity decision

They did it. The Supreme Court handed a massive victory to Donald Trump in this so-called “immunity” case, and it will probably take a year or more before there’s even a chance he’ll be held to trial for trying to overthrow the 2020 election and, thus, the government of the United States.

As feared, the six Republicans on the Court essentially threw Trump’s sedition case back to the lower court (with caveats) where there will be numerous decisions to make — which are all further appealable, resetting the case so Trump can drag things out for another year or more — about whether the crimes he’s committed are “official” or “private/personal” acts.

But that’s not the worst of it. They also turned Trump or any future fascist president into our first American king or führer.

And, of course, no matter what little fig leaves exist in this decision, if he’s elected this fall, he’ll appoint a corrupt attorney general, who’ll make Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election all go away immediately.

READ: Why I'm sticking with Joe Biden

Chief Justice Roberts went so far as to say in this corrupt decision that Trump’s speech exhorting people to attack the Capitol and try to hang Mike Pence, and his failure to bring in the National Guard or ask his rabid followers to back off, may well be part of his “official responsibilities.”

Speaking to Trump’s calling his rioters to overthrow the election, Chief Justice Roberts bizarrely writes that:

“[M]ost of a president’s public communications are likely to fall comfortably within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities.”

Justice Sotomayor is having none of it. Her dissent summarizes the situation elegantly:

“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.
“Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for ‘bold and unhesitating action’ by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.”

She adds:

“The Court now confronts a question it has never had to answer in the Nation’s history: Whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution. The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law. The majority makes three moves that, in effect, completely insulate Presidents from criminal liability.”

The six Republicans on this Court have essentially declared that they and Trump are so far above the law that the entire concept this nation was founded on — that “no person is above the law” — is null and void.

All a future president must do if they want to commit a crime, as Justice Jackson’s dissent demonstrates, is to claim that no matter what they did, it’s merely an “official act.” Including, specifically, directing the Attorney General to commit crimes himself.

This is the sort of decision you’d get from a court in Putin’s Russia.

As Justice Sotomayor’s dissent lays out clearly:

“The main takeaway of today’s decision is that all of a President’s official acts, defined without regard to motive or intent, are entitled to immunity that is ‘at least . . . presumptive,’ and quite possibly ‘absolute.’ Whenever the President wields the enormous power of his office, the majority says, the criminal law (at least presumptively) cannot touch him.
“This official-acts immunity has ‘no firm grounding in constitutional text, history, or precedent.’ Indeed, those ‘standard grounds for constitutional decisionmaking,’ all point in the opposite direction. No matter how you look at it, the majority’s official-acts immunity is utterly indefensible.”

She adds, correctly:

“The Constitution’s text contains no provision for immunity from criminal prosecution for former Presidents.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson makes it even more clear, in the bluntest of language, that this Court — acting like kings and queens themselves — have turned the former president into their peer — a king — with little to no accountability to the rule of law.

She wrote in her dissent:

“To fully appreciate the profound change the majority has wrought, one must first acknowledge what it means to have immunity from criminal prosecution. Put simply, immunity is ‘exemption’ from the duties and liabilities imposed by law.
“In its purest form, the concept of immunity boils down to a maxim—’[t]he King can do no wrong’—a notion that was firmly ‘rejected at the birth of [our] Republic.’ To say that someone is immune from criminal prosecution is to say that, like a King, he ‘is not under the coercive power of the law,’ which ‘will not suppose him capable of committing a folly, much less a crime.’
“Thus, being immune is not like having a defense under the law. Rather, it means that the law does not apply to the immunized person in the first place. Conferring immunity therefore ‘create[s] a privileged class free from liability for wrongs inflicted or injuries threatened.’”

Unless Congress acts quickly to overturn this obscene 6-3 decision — which won’t happen so long as Republicans control the House — democracy in America has been wounded, perhaps fatally, and the president has been made into a dictator, should he or she choose to behave that way.

As Justice Sotomayor said:

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune… With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

When we have a president (Biden) who respects the fundamental law, history, and traditions of America, we’ll be safe — for now. On the other hand, if Trump or any other fascist Republican becomes president, he can pretty much do anything he wants.

The imperial presidency is now officially here, not just rhetorically but in actuality. The six Republicans on the Supreme Court today did massive, perhaps irreparable, violence to our republic.

We’re in huge trouble, this Court is out of control, and the Senate needs at act (Senator Dick Durbin!!!).

If Trump is elected, these six Republicans just gave him near-Putin-like powers to end our democratic republican form of government, as Justice Gorsuch said, “for the ages.”

NOW READ: Why I'm sticking with Joe Biden

Today is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America.

Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

The SEDM explicitly works to:

— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty,
— Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color,
— Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,
— Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function,
— Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on the morbidly rich extremely low,
— Protect the privileges, power, and wealth of the (mostly white and male) economic overclass,
— Ghettoize public education and raise the cost of college to make social and economic mobility difficult,
— Empower and subsidize churches to take over public welfare functions like food, housing, and care for indigent people,
— Allow corporations to increase profits by dumping their waste products into the air and water,
— Subsidize those industries that financially support the political power structure, and,
— Heavily use actual slave labor.

For hardcore policy wonks, the Economic Policy Institute(EPI) did a deep dive into the SEDM last month: here’s how it works in summary.

Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

It’s thus no coincidence that ten out of the 20 Republican-run states that only use the federal minimum wage are in the Old South.

Anti-union or “right to work for less” efforts and laws are another key to the SEDM; the failed unionization effort last month at the Alabama Mercedes factory was a key victory for the GOP. Unions, after all, balance the power relationship between management and workers; promote higher wages and benefits; support workplace and product safety regulations; advance racial and gender equality; boost social mobility; and have historically been the most effective force for creating a healthy middle class.

Unionization, however, is antithetical to creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass, which is why, as EPI notes, “while union coverage rates stand at 11.2% nationally, rates in 2023 were as low as 3.0% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Texas and Georgia.”

Unions also make wage theft more difficult, essentially forcing government to defend workers who’ve been ripped off by their employers. That’s why Florida doesn’t even have a Department of Labor (it was dismantled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002), and the DOLs in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina no longer bother to enforce wage theft laws or recover stolen money for workers.

Another key to the SEDM is to end regulation of corporate “externalities,” a fancy word for the pollution that most governments in the developed world require corporations to pay to prevent or clean up. “Cancer Alley” is probably the most famous example of this at work: that stretch from west Texas to New Orleans has more than 200 refineries and chemical plants pouring poison into the air resulting in downwind communities having a 7 to 21 times greater exposure to these substances. And high rates of cancer: Southern corporate profits are boosted by sick people.

Between 2008 and 2018, EPI documents, funding for state environmental agencies was “cut [in Texas and Louisiana] by 35.2% and 34.8% respectively.… Funding was down by 33.7% in North Carolina, 32.8% in Delaware, 20.8% in Georgia, 20.3% in Tennessee, and 10% in Alabama.”

To keep income taxes low on the very wealthy, the SEDM calls for shifting as much of the taxpaying responsibility away from high-income individuals and dumping it instead on the working poor and middle class. This is done by either ending or gutting the income tax (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no income tax) and shifting to sales tax, property taxes, fees, and fines.

Nationally, for example, sales taxes provide 34.4% of state and local revenue, but in the SEDM states that burden is radically shifted to consumers: Tennessee, for example, gets 56.6% of their revenue from sales tax, Louisiana 53.3%, Florida 50.9%, Arkansas 49.6%, Alabama 48%, and Mississippi 45.5%. Fees for registering cars, obtaining drivers’ and professional licenses, tolls, traffic and other fines, and permits for home improvements all add to the load carried by average working people.

Republicans argue that keeping taxes low on “job creators” encourages them to “create more jobs,” but that old canard hasn’t really been taken seriously by anybody since Reagan first rolled it out in 1981. It does work to fill their money bins, though, and helps cover the cost of their (tax deductible) private jets, clubs, and yachts.

Another way the SEDM maintains a low-wage workforce is by preventing young people from getting the kind of good education that would enable them to move up and out of their economic and social class. Voucher systems to gut public education, villainization of unionized teachers and librarians, and increasing college tuition all work together to maintain high levels of functional illiteracy. Fifty-four percent of Americans have a literacy rate that doesn’t exceed sixth grade, with the nation’s worst illiteracy mostly in the Old South.

Imposing this limitation against economic mobility on women is also vital to the SEDM. Southern states are famous for their lack of female representation in state legislatures (West Virginia 13%, Tennessee 14%, Mississippi and South Carolina 15%, Alabama and Louisiana 18%), and the states that have most aggressively limited access to abortion and reproductive healthcare (designed to keep women out of the workplace and dependent on men) are entirely Republican-controlled.

Perhaps the most important part of the SEDM pushed by Republicans and Project 2025 is gutting the social safety net. Wealthy rightwingers have complained since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s that transferring wealth from them to poor and middle-class people is socialism, the first step toward a complete communist tyranny in the United States. It’s an article of faith for today’s GOP.

Weekly unemployment benefits, for example, are lowest in “Mississippi ($235), Alabama ($275), Florida ($275), Louisiana ($275), Tennessee ($275), South Carolina ($326), and North Carolina ($350)” with Southern states setting the maximum number of weeks you can draw benefits at 12 in Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, 14 in Alabama and Georgia, and a mere 16 weeks in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

While only 3.3% of children in the Northeast lack health insurance, for the Southern states that number more than doubles to 7.7%. Ten states using the SEDM still refuse to expand Medicaid to cover all state residents living and working in poverty, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

The main benefit to employers of this weak social safety net is that workers are increasingly desperate for wages — any sort of wages — and even the paltriest of benefits to keep their heads above water economically. As a result, they’re far more likely to tolerate exploitative workplace conditions, underpaid work, and wage theft.

Finally, the SEDM makes aggressive use of the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery. That’s not a metaphor: the Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added]

That “except as punishment for crime” is the key. While Iceland’s and Japan’s incarceration rates are 36 for every 100,000 people, Finland and Norway come in at 51, Ireland and Canada at 88, there are 664 people in prison in America for every 100,000 people. No other developed country even comes close, because no other developed country also allows legalized slavery under color of law.

Fully 800,000 (out of a total 1.2 million prisoners) Americans are currently held in conditions of slave labor in American jails and prisons, most working for private prison corporations that profitably insource work and unfairly compete against normal American companies. Particularly in the South, this workforce is largely Black and Hispanic.

As the ACLU documented for the EPI, “The vast majority of work done by prisoners in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas is unpaid.” Literal slave labor, in other words. It’s a international scandal, but it’s also an important part of this development model that was, after all, first grounded in chattel slavery.

The Christian white supremacist roots of the SEDM worldview are best summed up by the lobbyist and head of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, Vance Muse — the inventor of the modern “right to work for less” model and advocate for the Southern Economic Development Model — who famously proclaimed in 1944, just days after Arkansas and Florida became the first states to adopt his anti-union legislation, that it was all about keeping Blacks and Jews in their places to protect the power and privileges of wealthy white people.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South. Or, as today’s MAGA GOP would call it, “the New Model.”

She may never be the same.

This past weekend we learned about an incident from May when three American citizens were hanging out at their apartment complex swimming pool, a mom and her two children, a little girl, 3, and a boy who was 7 years old. Mom was Muslim, so she wore a modest swimsuit and a hijab.

Which infuriated Elizabeth Wolf, a 42-year-old white woman, who, upon arriving at the pool, began loudly berating the young mother, using racial slurs to tell her she wasn’t welcome in white America. Wolf then jumped into the pool and grabbed the two children, who were playing in the shallow end, and tried to drown them.

With mom’s help, the little boy escaped with scratches from Wolf’s fingernails, but Wolf succeeded in dragging the 3-year-old girl into a deeper part of the pool and was repeatedly holding her head under water as the little girl began to drown.

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A bystander intervened, jumping into the pool and rescuing the little girl; when police arrived and handcuffed Wolf, she screamed at the arresting police officer:

“Tell her I will kill her, and I will kill her whole family.”

An eyewitness who was also in the pool with her own 7-year-old told a reporter for KDFW:

“That was like 10 seconds but it felt like forever. She was like, ‘Help me! She’s killing my baby, she’s killing my baby!’”

The little girl was so traumatized by the incident that she’s now afraid to leave her family’s apartment. Her PTSD may well affect her for the rest of her life. Can you imagine if that had happened to your child or grandchild?

The mom, who news reports aren’t identifying to protect her from the other many violent racists daily encouraged by Trump and Texas Republicans, told the local media:

“We are American citizens, originally from Palestine, and I don’t know where to go to feel safe with my kids. My country is facing a war, and we are facing that hate here. My daughter is traumatized; whenever I open the apartment door, she runs away and hides, telling me she is afraid the lady will come and immerse her head in the water again. Also, my husband’s employment is jeopardized, due to having to leave work to accompany me and our four kids whenever we have appointments and errands to run.”

While hate has always been a part of the American landscape, the entrance of Donald Trump onto the American political scene has led to an explosion of hate crimes against racial and religious minorities.

That’s because hate is contagious.

One scientific study of memes that can evoke violence found that those based on hate of “the other” were more than twice as “contagious” as those directed within the group itself.

Politicians throughout history intuitively know this, which is why Viktor Orbán trashes Roma people, Putin trashes Muslims and gays, and Modi attacks Indians raised in the Islamic religion.

The politics of hate are cheap, easy, and effective, but generally modern American politicians haven’t employed them because history has shown how societally destructive they can be.

Until Trump explicitly embraced white supremacy and white “Christian” nationalism, and the entire GOP chose to repeat the horrors that corresponded with the resurgent rise of the Klan in the early decades of the 20th century.

Hate crimes in America had been on a steady decline starting in the 1990s, when the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program began collecting data on them, with the exception of bumps in anti-Muslim hate after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (initially mis-attributed to Muslim terrorists) and 9/11.

That continuous (with the exception of those two transient bumps) 25-year decline in hate crimes came to a screeching halt in 2015, when Donald Trump began his campaign of hatred, demonizing immigrants, Muslims, and Black people.

The FBI reports that hate crimes showed a huge jump that year, rising 6.8% over 2014. The following year, as Trump became the GOP’s 2016 nominee and doubled-down on his hate-filled rhetoric, saw a second explosion in hate crimes, up nearly 5% in one single year over 2015.

After Trump declared he was going to ban all Muslim immigration, anti-Muslim hate crimes went up 67% in 2015 and the quarter of the election, the fall/winter of 2016, saw a 25.9% increase in documented hate crimes over the same fourth quarter of 2015.

A University of North Texas study found that the counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226% increase in reported hate crimes when compared to counties in the same states that didn’t host a rally.

Hatred can be as contagious as infectious bacteria and viruses. It crosses social, economic, and family lines to infect its victims, and once exposure has happened and hate is allowed to grow within the host, it begins to corrode emotional and mental functions as well as negatively impacting the infected individual’s general physical health.

A fellow called into my radio/TV program yesterday and went on a rant about how President Biden should be arrested for allowing “murderers and rapists” to enter the country illegally. He’d clearly caught the hate virus from Trump and his sycophants in rightwing hate media, echoing them word-for-word.

I explained that the safest communities in America, from border towns to big cities, were those with the largest undocumented immigrant populations for the simple reasons that they don’t want to commit crimes and be brought to the attention of authorities who may deport them…and that they’re here looking for work and opportunity rather than chances to commit crimes (which they could just as easily do in their home countries).

He was completely unconvinced; an undocumented immigrant recently raped a teenager and Fox “News” had pounded on the story for days; he kept repeating the story. Hate had infected him and, with continual reinforcement from rightwing hate media, reached its claws deep into his vulnerable psyche.

Trump’s most recent hate-filled abomination was suggesting to a delighted white “Christian conservative” audience that the UFC should throw immigrants into locked cages with professional fighters for entertainment. The “Christian” crowd laughed and applauded when he said:

“I think the migrant guy might win. That’s how tough they are. … These are tough people. These people are tough, and they’re nasty. Mean. It’s incredible that they come [here to America] totally unchecked.”

There truly is no bottom when it comes to Trump and his willingness to use hate and sadism to try to stay out of prison.

When Gerald Ford was inaugurated as President, he told the American people:

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. …
“As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.”

Next January — G-d willing Trump is defeated and later imprisoned — we’ll have to engage the hard work of healing our nation from being daily bathed in hate these nine long years. Even today, we must begin the process with our friends and families.

It won’t be easy, but it’s vital work that will fall to all of us. It should include adding the study of hate and its political legacy to our civics classes, as Germany did after WWII.

Here in America in the 1940s, TIME, LIFE, and Fortune magazines produced anti-hate films funded by the US government to deal with the legacy of hateful American pre-war support for Nazism and the Klan. The military itself produced similar films explaining how and why hate had destroyed Germany and brought us into the war as a result.

Our government should undertake a similar effort, in collaboration with major media companies that have sworn off promoting hatred. Hopefully, if we all engage, we can prevent any more 3-year-olds from becoming the victims of Trump’s, Fox’s, and the GOP’s use of hate as a cheap political weapon.

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