Thom Hartmann

—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.

READ: Why I'm scared to death about Thursday

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.

NOW READ: Why I'm scared to death about Thursday

In less than a month, Republicans will meet in Milwaukee to crown Donald Trump as their Emperor King and Sun God. But the real powers behind the GOP — the billionaires and their institutions that created Project 2025 as a how-to manual to convert American democracy into something like the old Confederacy — don’t much care about poor old Donald.

Sure, they want him to be the nominee because NBC trained him well in the dark art of playing a successful businessman on television. He brings in the rubes like nobody since Huey Long; he’s a singularly brilliant politician, much as Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Mussolini are and were.

But he can also be irrational, impulsive, disloyal, dishonest, and unpredictable, qualities that make the men who want to revive the Confederacy to replace our republican form of government wary. They have big plans — far bigger than Trump’s tiny dream of vengeance — and don’t want him screwing things up.

Thus, the real action in Milwaukee won’t be the show — though it’ll be a hell of a show — around Trump’s coronation; it’ll be in the back rooms where Trump is told who’s going to be his vice president. That’ll be the guy (it will be a guy) who does the actual heavy lifting in “deconstructing the administrative state,” seizing control of our media, and stripping average Americans of what’s left of their wealth and rights.

It’ll almost certainly work much like it did with the contestants on The Apprentice: NBC’s writers and producers would figure out who’d make the best winner, who’d draw the best audience “in the demo,” who would get the most PR for the show, and then Trump would pretend the choice was his. After all, he did exactly that for 14 television seasons over more than 300 episodes; he knows the routine well.

Trump is elderly, obese, and self-absorbed. He’s a heart attack waiting to happen, his cognitive capabilities are clearly slipping, and he’s incapable of seeing any issue in any context other than, “What’s in it for Donald?” They had to draw him pictures when they did intelligence briefings in the White House.

But the Project 2025 folks and their Steve Bannon fellow travelers, in their effort to tear down America and make our country safe(er) for morbidly rich oligarchs, have big plans, including:

— Placing the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies like the Department of Justice, under direct presidential control through an extreme interpretation of the “unitary executive theory,” thus turning the federal police system into an enforcement mechanism against dissenters.
— Eliminating job protections for thousands of federal civil servants, allowing for their replacement by political appointees loyal to the administration, reversing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and returning America to the corrupt spoils system.
— Dismantling the Department of Education and transferring or terminating its programs, speeding up the GOP’s ongoing project of ending public schools (with their unionized teachers) and replacing them with private, segregated, often-religious academies for the white upper middle class.
— Slashing funding for the Department of Justice and dismantling the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (which will probably be replaced by a new Schutzstaffel-style police force answerable directly to the president, as Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have already done in Florida and Texas).
— Abolishing the Federal Reserve and potentially returning to a gold-backed currency, transferring power over the nation’s economy from the Fed’s technocrats into the hands of the wealthiest men in America.
— Criminalizing pornography, abortion, mifepristone, and most forms of birth control, placing women under the direct control of the state.
— Removing legal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, returning us to the days when queer people were routinely harassed and murdered.
— Terminating all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and affirmative action initiatives across the federal government, locking into place the white racial hierarchy that currently controls most wealth and power in the USA.
— Cutting funding for renewable energy research and climate change initiatives while boosting fossil fuel production so the fossil fuel barons who largely own the GOP can make more billions.
— Imposing work requirements for recipients of food stamps (SNAP) and other welfare programs as the first step toward ending all welfare programs that are funded by rich people’s taxpayer dollars.
— Extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts , which would add $4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years according to estimates, so billionaires can continue to only pay a 3.4% income tax.
— Requiring a three-fifths supermajority in Congress to raise individual or corporate income taxes, making future tax increases on the morbidly rich almost impossible.
— Infusing the government with elements of Christianity, rejecting our nation’s Founders’ vision of America as the world’s first secular democratic republic.
— Eliminating terms like “sexual orientation,” “gender equality,” and “reproductive right” from all federal laws and regulations.
— Appointing more extremist federal judges who would overturn landmark Supreme Court decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and Griswold v Connecticut, which legalized birth control.
— Restricting voting rights by pushing for strict voter ID laws, limiting mail-in and early voting, and criminalizing voter registration drives as DeSantis has done in Florida.
— Defunding or abolishing agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) so America’s consumers and citizens stand naked before the predation of and poisoning by massive corporations.
— Limiting legal immigration levels and making it harder to obtain citizenship or permanent residency to keep white people as the majority in this country as long as possible.
— Allowing public businesses and services to deny service based on “religious objections” to racial and religious minorities and the queer community.
— Promoting “patriotic education” that celebrates America's Christian heritage and the GOP, while downplaying issues like slavery and the Native American genocide.
— Expanding mandatory minimum sentencing and reversing criminal justice reform efforts around reducing mass incarceration so anybody who challenges them can be tucked away in a profitable private prison.
— Revoking federal protections for national parks and monuments while opening those and other public lands to drilling, mining, and development.
— Allowing states to impose work requirements and time limits on Medicaid coverage, including for children, pregnant women, elderly, and disabled beneficiaries who are currently exempt, as the first step toward ending Medicaid altogether.
— Permitting states to eliminate mandatory benefits like nursing home care and children's health screenings (EPSDT) from their Medicaid programs.
— Encouraging more restrictive asset tests that could terminate Medicaid eligibility altogether for low-income families with modest savings.
— Converting Medicaid to a capped block grant or per capita cap system that would significantly reduce federal funding over time until the program is strangled to death.
— Establishing a voucher system to allow Medicaid beneficiaries to purchase private insurance instead, despite less affordability and benefits, as a precursor to ending the program altogether.
— Cutting funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and restructuring it along “conservative principles.”
— Revoking the federal government's ability to enforce anti-discrimination protections in areas like housing, employment, and education.

And that’s just a partial list.

To accomplish a major task like this is going to require a person who’s smart, well-educated, disciplined, wealthy, and utterly without scruples or a moral compass. In other words, JD Vance (or somebody very much like him: Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Elise Stefanik).

Trump should be watching his back right now.

It’s a safe bet that the minute he begins to stray from the oligarchs’ agenda, his cabinet will get together and pull a 25th Amendment on him, as was so frequently discussed by members of his cabinet during his first term as president.

Or, in true mob fashion, they’ll just sit him down and tell him that he can have a fine fun time playing president, but somebody else is going to take care of the actual business side of the operation.

And odds are he’ll never see it coming.

Have you noticed how rarely Republicans talk about actual issues?

— They rant about brown people pouring over the southern border but refuse to even discuss what could be done about it. In fact, when the Senate came up with a workable solution, Republicans in the House killed it at the insistence of Donald Trump. No policies, no solutions other than a Nazi-like round-up of 11 million people and a series of concentration camps.

— They complain about the state of the economy, but have no arguments about what can be done to enhance the economy other than more tax cuts for billionaires, who are already paying a pathetic average 3.4% income tax.

— They whine that our students aren’t doing well but refuse to engage in any serious discussion about how to take us back to the era when America had the newest and most successful public education system in the world.

— They yell about prescription drug prices and the high cost of insurance, but their only policy suggestion is to end Obamacare and Medicaid.

— They love to slander BLM and big cities with large Black populations but refuse to even entertain a conversation about healing the racial divide in this country; instead, their efforts are directed toward outlawing or decertifying Black History classes, as just happened in South Carolina.

All of this is because the GOP is now a post-politics party.

The reason why is simple and straightforward: The people who’ve captured the Republican Party envision a day when they won’t have to even pretend that they’re engaging in good-faith political discussions or negotiations because they will have outlawed, sidelined, or intimidated their opposition into impotence and silence.

READ: The shocking truth behind the GOP's MAGA lie machine

They’re using our political system this election year, in other words, so they can seize enough power to destroy our political system.

And they have a model they’re using for what they want to replace it with: the Confederacy.

In the first decade of the 19th century, the invention of the cotton gin transformed the South, as I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The machine could do the work of 50 enslaved people, so the wealthiest plantation owners could wipe out thousands of small farmers and other competitors.

Now that one machine could clean as much cotton as 50 people, every cotton plantation faced the possibility that it could produce 50 times as much cotton (and profit), if only it had 50 times as much land to grow the cotton on and 50 times as many people to pick it.

The wealthiest among the Southern oligarchs colluded on price-fixing to bankrupt and then buy out small farms and plantations for pennies on the dollar. Within a few decades, by the early 1840s, a handful of fabulously wealthy families had seized complete control of the economic and political systems of each state in the Old South.

And they brooked no opposition: White men who dared run or vote against them in elections were often assassinated or lynched; newspapers were seized and handed over to oligarchs friendly to the plantation owners; elections became a mere charade. They even monitored the mail: if you wrote a letter to a friend, complaining about the end of democracy, you’d find yourself in prison or hanged from a tree.

Democracy in the South, by the 1850s, was completely dead. The Confederacy had become a police state. And then they reached out to try to end that pesky remnant of democracy in the North as well.

It’s nearly exactly what the MAGA GOP is trying to do today.

As historian Dr. Forrest A. Nabors wrote in his brilliant book From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, the richest families in the South had replaced democracy with a violent oligarchy, which today I’d call fascism:

“A new generation of rulers reshaped the South around their new ruling principle. …The development of Southern oligarchy portended the rupture of the union, regardless of the ties that bound them together, because no ties, physical, legal, or otherwise, can overcome the difference between fundamentally opposed types of political regimes.”

Illinois’ Representative John Farnsworth noted that history in his 1864 speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives:

“[With t]he invention of the cotton-gin, … the greed for power took possession of the slaveholders, and the avarice of these men overleaped itself…
“Then it was, Mr. Speaker, that the slave power got the control of the Government, of the executive, legislative, and judicial departments.
“Then it was that they got possession of the high places of society. They took possession of the churches. They took possession of the lands. Then it became criminal for a man to open his lips in denunciation of [them].
“Then followed … the throttling of the right to petition; suppressing the freedom of the press; the suppression of the freedom of the mails; all these things followed the taking possession of the Government and lands by the slave power, until we were the slaves of slaves, being chained to the car of this slave Juggernaut…”

This is the model that today’s GOP, the reinvented Confederacy, is using to replace modern American democracy.

And they’re not even bashful about it: It’s why 10 Republican-controlled states officially commemorate the Confederacy with state holidays every year and six refuse to recognize Juneteenth: Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina and North Carolina.

Reagan’s massive tax cuts (and Bush’s and Trump’s) had the same oligarch-producing impact as the cotton gin; before Reagan, billionaires were virtually unknown and few wealthy people were politically active. Today, they own Congress, our social and news media, and the Supreme Court.

The billionaire-funded Project 2025 is this generation’s version of John C. Calhoun’s nullification speech and South Carolina’s secession proclamation.

In this brave new world run by Citizen Trump and the MAGA GOP:

— Slave labor is replaced by the perpetual poverty and servitude of a $7.25 minimum wage and Red state laws hostile to unions. Children are encouraged to leave school and enter the workplace in dangerous jobs like slaughterhouses.

— Quality education becomes exclusively the province of the rich and white as public schools are gutted by voucher programs while college tuition explodes.

— Healthcare is a luxury available only to the wealthy as insurance becomes unaffordable, Republican governors refuse to expand Medicaid, and medical practices are acquired by hedge funds and converted to concierge practices with $3000/year annual fees.

— Media that speak truth to power are bankrupted by new libel laws, taken over and turned into Republican propaganda machines.

— Women, people of color, and religious minorities are made culturally and legally subordinate to white “Christian” men.

— In any Republican-controlled part of the country where there’s a chance a Democrat could win an election, the voter rolls are purged of Democrats and those voters who survive the purges find increasingly complex barriers to casting a ballot.

— And, of course, they want to preserve the Confederate names and monuments still extant and bring back the monuments that have been removed. As we saw on January 6th, the Confederate battle flag is one of their favorite totems.

The new GOP motto might as well be, “We don’t need no stinkin’ issues; we just want power and revenge for the heroes of the Old South and the New Insurrection.”

It’s why they lie so easily on the Sunday talk shows and in political campaigns: They don’t give a damn about issues. All they care about is power.

And their base is with them. As Oliver Markus Malloy wrote in the headline for his Bad ChoicesSubstack newsletter yesterday, “MAGA dumbfucks are so fucking dumb, they have no idea that the pro-slavery Confederates were the bad guys!”

In fact, they know what the sides were in the Civil War, and they are intentionally choosing — embracing — the Confederacy.

Democrats — and Americans more generally — must finally realize that Trump’s MAGA GOP is no longer interested in policy or politics but solely wants to seize absolute political and economic power to end our democracy and reinvent the Confederacy.

Only then can we begin a discussion about how to deal with this Second Great Insurrection that they hope will reboot the Civil War, only — now outfitted with deadly bump-stocks — this time with a different outcome.

Until then, as we try to debate “issues,” we’re merely engaging in meaningless political theater. Instead, we must identify, ostracize, and politically and legally crush this growing and violent insurrection against America and her traditional ideals.

READ: Report details why wealthy people really oppose democracy

Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, famously told the Fuhrer, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Donald Trump and the MAGA faction of the Republican Party have taken Goebbels’ advice to heart, and it’s going to make this fall’s election one like we’ve never seen before.

Already they’ve been lying so often and so effectively that nearly all Republicans, and majorities or near-majorities of Americans, believe:

— the GOP lie that we’re in a recession (we’re in better shape, in most ways, than any time since the 1960s and inflation last month was zero while Ronald Reagan never got it below 4.1% in his entire eight years);
— Republican lies about crime being up (it’s down dramatically since Trump);
— their lies that “Democrats want elective abortion up to the moment of birth” (none have ever said that);
— Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump by “voter fraud”;
— GOP lies that the southern border is “wide open”;
— the Republican lie that Social Security is on the verge of bankruptcy and must be saved by privatization or benefits cuts;
— their vicious lie that queer people are pedophiles targeting America’s schoolchildren; and
— their NRA lie that more and more deadly guns will keep our kids safe.

At the level of presidential politics, it’s gotten so brazen that Trump is actually asking people if they’re better off today than they were four years ago. That’s four years ago when people were dying from Covid that he was not handling well, the economy was in the tank, millions had lost their jobs, and people were so desperate for food they sat in their cars in 5-mile-long lines for food banks.

ALSO READ: Report details why wealthy people really oppose democracy

It’s also migrated to Congressional Republicans. As Marc Elias writes for is brilliant Democracy Docketnewsletter:

“Over the last month, you can feel that something important has happened. A tipping point has been reached. Republicans who used to act like they had not heard or read the latest Trump outrage now show up at his trials and parrot his most vile lies. The GOP now openly extol the virtues of political prosecutions and disparage the rule of law.”

Even Republicans on the Supreme Court have gotten into the act. Justifying his decision to legalize bump-stocks, Clarence Thomas was so audacious as to insert this naked lie into his decision announced last Friday: “[T]he shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot…” The whole point of a bump-stock is that you can simply hold the trigger down continuously and spray up to 800 bullets a minute.

Tragically for American politics, as former Republican strategist and attorney George Conway recently noted, “[T]he Republican Party has become addicted to lies under Trump.”

Americans are generally used to believing their politicians are telling the truth, albeit often a slightly shaded version for political convenience.

When Kennedy debated Nixon in 1960, the former Vice President honestly argued that he believed the best way to end the segregation of lunch counters in the South was for the president to call them up and ask them to be kind to Black people. Senator Kennedy honestly said he believed it would take the force of federal power to get Southern racists to follow the law.

When Reagan promised us that massive, budget-busting, deficit-creating tax cuts for the morbidly rich would “pay for themselves” and “produce a more general prosperity” as they “trickled down” to average working people, he probably believed it was true. Americans thought so; we’ve left Reaganomics largely in place for all of the 43 years since then.

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sold us on the naked lie that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was implicitly involved in 9/11, more than half of America went along with it because we’ve been conditioned to believe our political leaders tell the truth. At least there was a grain of truth in that case: Reagan had illegally sold Hussein weapons of mass destruction that he then used against his own Kurdish citizens and, for all Bush and Cheney knew, some were still around.

But what happens when politicians stop bothering with even a fig-leaf of truth to justify a giant, world-altering lie (like Bush’s and Cheney’s) and, instead, just make things up out of whole cloth? How can a political system survive such an assault on the truth?

James “Father of the Constitution” Madison warned us about the danger of a special interest group (“faction”) or political party adopting lies as a political tool; it was already happening in his day, with wild rumors circulating about the content of the new Constitution he’d helped write and was then not yet ratified. In Federalist 10, he wrote:

“The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”

The last time the GOP embraced outright lies in a widespread way like this was in the lead-up to America’s participation in World War II, as multiple Republican senators, representatives, and media figures were taking direct cash bribes and talking points from Hitler’s intelligence service. (Rachel Maddow has documented much of this in her book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascismand her podcast Ultra.)

In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on October 23, 1940, warned the nation:

“Truthful campaign discussion of public issues is essential to the American form of Government; but wilful misrepresentation of fact has no place either during election time or at any other time.”

Roosevelt noted that multiple Republicans had taken Goebbel’s advice and thought they could beat him and his Democrats by simply telling bald-faced lies:

“Certain techniques of propaganda, created and developed in dictator countries, have been imported into this campaign. It is the very simple technique of repeating and repeating and repeating falsehoods, with the idea that by constant repetition and reiteration, with no contradiction, the misstatements will finally come to be believed.”

In Roosevelt’s time there was a rightwing press, but it was mostly fringe. There were no media giants owned by foreign billionaires willing to regularly lie to the American people for billions in profit. Between the Fairness Doctrine that required stations to “broadcast in the public interest” and the Equal Time Rule, our media was generally dedicated to telling actual truth in what they called News.

Therefore, Roosevelt said, he was confident Americans wouldn’t fall for the GOP lies that supported Hitler and promoted Nazism here at home:

“Dictators have had great success in using this technique; but only because they were able to control the press and the radio, and to stifle all opposition. That is why I cannot bring myself to believe that in a democracy like ours, where the radio and a part of the press—I repeat, where the radio and a part of the press—remain open to both sides, repetition of deliberate misstatements will ever prevail.”

Today’s press bears little resemblance to the media of the 1940s. Over 1,500 rightwing and 800 religious radio stations and hundreds of rightwing television stations daily sing the praises of Trump and the GOP, repeating the latest insane lies as if they’re gospel truth. Russian, Iranian, and Chinese trolls dominate political discussions on social media, along with a bizarre South African billionaire who appears fond of Nazis messaging lies to Americans on his social media platform.

This has created the perfect opening for a soulless Republican Party and its MAGA candidates to fully embrace Goebbels’ Big Lie strategy. And they’re doing it with gusto.

Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger writes on his Substack blog:

“In the latest how-low-can-they-go, the GOP and Fox News seem to have worked together to distribute a maliciously doctored bit of video that targets President Biden’s mental capacity. The video supposedly shows him wandering away from other leaders at the G-7 summit in Italy, as if he doesn’t quite know where he is and what’s going on.”

In fact, the entire video in context shows no such thing, but the deceptive edit used by Republicans and Fox “News” seems to “prove” that Biden is “losing it.”

MAGA Republican US Senate candidate Royce White is so certain the dozens of rightwing media in Minnesota will back up his lies about his failure to pay child support that, when confronted with them by Daily Beast reporter Rachel Olding, “he argued that one of his testicles garners more ‘media attention’ than The Daily Beast.”

In a transparent effort to prevent fact-checking of GOP lies, congressional Republicans launched an inquiry into the Stanford Internet Observatory, the gold-standard organization for determining the veracity of political information circulating online. That was followed by a lawsuit from Stephen Miller’s America First Legal and a second one that is heading for the Supreme Court.

The Washington Postreports that the Observatory is shutting down its operations, having been financially crippled by the cost of the Republican lawsuits and the congressional investigation. The organization that was the first to out Russian online support for Trump in 2016 will soon be no more:

“Two ongoing lawsuits and two congressional inquiries into the Observatory have cost Stanford millions of dollars in legal fees, one of the people told The Washington Post. Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as [Republican] legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda.”

This fall’s election will be like none we’ve ever seen before in American history. Already Fox and other rightwing outlets are using doctored videos, Trump has published multiple deepfakes, and across the GOP there’s a full-on commitment to reciting easily debunked lies.

They’ll continue doing this right up to election day and beyond because they know that Goebbel’s advice actually works.

Most concerning, it’s impossible to know in advance what their next lie will be. But you can bet it will be more malicious than the Bush campaign’s amplifying slurs on John Kerry’s Vietnam war service record, or Trump’s despicable, racist, birther attacks on Obama.

Now that so much of our media is so frequently failing to call out GOP lies, and the nation’s #1 cable channel revels in repeating lies for profit, the pushback against this evil, democracy-destroying strategy falls to us.

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