~~ recommended by dmorista ~~

Introduction by dmorista: Thom Hartmann writes an article, discussing some political or socioeconomic issue, each weekday that he presents his radio show. Here are two from over the past 3 days.

In Item 1). “History Must Record Trump's Plan for a Nationwide ‘Kent State’ Massacre”, Hartmann compares the events around the January 6, 2021 insurrection and takeover of the U.S. Capital Building to the infamous slaughter of anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. It makes for interesting reading and is thought provoking reading. Hartmann makes some telling points in comparing what happened during the Reagan Regime in Ohio and the plans that Hartmann outlines for a nationwide military enforced takeover of U.S. society. One issue that he does not take up is the fact that the killing of the 4 students on the Kent State University campus was, in reality, one of the nails in the coffin of public support for the Vietnam War in the U.S.

Item 2). “Why American Fascists Label All Who Oppose Them as Communists”, discusses the odd fact that the American far-right describes and names anybody who opposes their extremist agenda as Communists despite the fact that it is totally inaccurate and untrue. Hartmann exposes his left-liberal limitations with his knee-jerk condemnation of some of the Global South societies that have, at least partially, escaped from the worst excesses of the variant of Capitalism that dominates the Global South. And he also criticizes Eastern European societies without any realistic discussion of how the countries that were occupied by the Red Army as a result of the German attack on the Soviet Union and the horrific war that resulted ended up being Nominally in the Socialist camp.

Finally Item 3). “US Protest Law Tracker”, enumerates 277 examples of harsh authoritarian laws to restrict public protest that have been proposed in state legislatures, including some 42 already enacted and 15 pending. I have trimmed out most of the entries for these laws, leaving only 13 total entries as examples; 1 from the Federal Laws proposed, 11 from Alabama (all the laws listed for that primitive far-right state), and 1 from Wyoming. Looking at this roster of repressive laws we can only assume that the reactionaries and proto-fascists are planning to impose a harsh authoritarian regime on the populace of the U.S.

1). “History Must Record Trump's Plan for a Nationwide ‘Kent State’ Massacre”,

The bottom line here is that Trump and his co-conspirators were not only willing but planning to recreate Reagan’s and Nixon’s Kent State slaughter on a nationwide basis...

Daily Take From, The Hartmann Report, Thom Hartmann, Aug 3, 2023 at, < https://hartmannreport.com/p/history-must-record-trumps-plan-for-992 >

Image by Ri Butov from Pixabay

Although it’s generally only mentioned in passing in the mainstream media, there are two particularly chilling passages in Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump.

Both, to my mind, invoke Kent State, but on a much larger scale.

With that crime, you’ll recall, on May 1, 1970, Ronald Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” adding, as The New York Times noted at the time:

“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Four days later, on May 5, 1970, Reagan got his bloodbath at Kent State University when 28 National Guard soldiers opened fire with live ammunition on an estimated 3,000 student protestors.

Over a mere 13 seconds, nearly 70 shots were fired. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed, and nine others were wounded. One of the dead, William Schroeder, was shot in the back, as were several of those injured by gunfire.

The murders at Kent State shocked the nation, and, I remember well, caused many of us in the antiwar movement to reconsider some of our tactics. That was the year the Weather Underground, an SDS offshoot willing to using violence, began to pick up membership in a big way.

Now imagine if the plan Trump, Eastman, Giuliani, Powell, Chesebro, and Clark laid out had succeeded.

If the mob had seized and hanged Mike Pence, and Chuck Grassley had taken the Speaker’s gavel in his place, accepting the fake electors from a half-dozen states and certifying Trump as having been re-elected.

If Trump then declared a state of emergency, and invoked the Insurrection Act, putting the military in charge of the country.

The possibility of this so alarmed all 10 living former defense secretaries that they wrote an OpEd for the Washington post on January 3rd that said:

“As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, ‘there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.’ Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”

It could be Kent State multiplied a hundredfold. People would pour into the streets in every city in America, protesting the theft of the 2020 election by Donald Trump after the media and secretaries of state of each of those states had announced he’d lost the election by over 7 million votes.

As the Trump indictment shows, a “Senior Advisor” (I’m guessing Mark Meadows) told John Eastman (Co-Conspirator 2) that pulling such a stunt would mean:

“[Y]ou’re going to cause riots in the streets.”

Eastman’s response was described in the indictment:

“Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic.”

Eastman was echoing one of the slogans of the modern rightwing white supremacist militia movement, which loves to quote (and put on tee-shirts) Jefferson’s 1787 comment in a letter to John Adams’ son-in-law:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

In a similar conversation, this time arguing that Trump could call out the military to use live ammunition and the power of arrest to quell unrest, the indictment notes:

“The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be ‘riots in every major city in the United States.’

“Co-Conspirator 4 [Jeffrey Clark] responded, ‘Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.’”

The Insurrection Act was passed in 1792 during the administration of George Washington, updated in 1807 and 1871, and is extraordinarily broad, so much so that for years good-government groups like the Brennan Center for Justice have been calling for it to be updated.

It’s the only exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the US military from engaging in domestic law enforcement activity. Under the Insurrection Act, the President could order the entire US military into the streets, with live ammunition and the power to both make arrests and kill protestors who resist.

Section 253 of the Act, for example, permits the president to send troops to put down “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”

Notice the word “conspiracy” there; as the Brennan Center says:

“This provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law.”

And you can bet that Donald Trump would do just that. America would be under martial law — under the control of the US military, complete with curfews and a total ban on public demonstrations, enforced by soldiers wielding fully automatic weapons and live ammunition — all within a day or two.

Trump could have done it, too, if the military had been willing to go along with him. The Supreme Court decided early on that this question is for the president alone to decide. In 1827 the Supreme Court ruled that “the authority to decide whether [an exigency requiring the militia to be called out] has arisen belongs exclusively to the President, and . . . his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.”

It would have been the end of America as we know it. And Trump, Giuliani, and Eastman all knew it. And wanted it.

Trump had already drafted an executive order bringing something close to it into being, as I noted here two weeks ago when speculating about why Tommy Tuberville was keeping the upper ranks of the military vacant in case Trump wins in 2024.

General Mike Flynn, after having been convicted of lying to the FBI and concealing knowledge about Russian involvement in the Trump campaign, was pardoned by Trump in late November, 2020, after Trump had lost the election. Flynn immediately took the position that Trump should declare martial law, retweeting a call:

“to immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution…”

The reason, Flynn’s retweet noted, was because Democrats had stolen the election from Trump and were plotting to turn America into a communist state:

“We have well-funded, armed and trained Marxists in ANTIFA and BLM strategically positioned in our major cities acting openly with violence to silence opposition to their anti-American agenda.”

This would have gone way beyond just re-doing an allegedly corrupt election. After stealing the votes of 81 million Americans, they wanted to lock down the country with armed force to end all dissent directed against Trump or the GOP.

Trump had essentially rehearsed this during the summer of 2020 when he ordered troops and helicopters to attack peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, so he could do a photo-op with an upside-down bible.

Former Defense Secretary General James Mattis was so horrified by that he said of the incident:

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

Trump’s co-conspirators around January 6th called for a purge of our government, like the one Trump acolyte Johnny McEntee began when he was the “Deputy President” to Trump, searching social media accounts for federal employees he could fire because they’d “liked” things posted by Democrats or liked “leftwing entertainers like Taylor Swift.”

Most chilling — and not yet included in the indictment — was the role of the quislings in the GOP who were ready and eager to help Trump end American democracy.

If Mike Pence was hanged or otherwise incapacitated, Chuck Grassley told a reporter for the Iowa Capital Dispatch he was next-in-line in Senate seniority and so would take over the proceedings, presumably to accept the fake electors from Senator Ron Johnson and thus hand the election to Trump.

On January 5th, the day before a mob built a gallows and tried to find Pence for over an hour, Grassley said:

“Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice President isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there — I will be presiding over the Senate.”

Challenging the result of an election like Trump was proposing isn’t such an unusual thing, Grassley argued, telling reporters:

“First of all, it’s a legal process under the law and under the Constitution, for these folks to do what they’re doing. It was done by the Democrats in 2004 and I think one other time. People that are finding fault with Republicans doing it shouldn’t do it when it’s done by Democrats.”

Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson was also apparently in on the plot. As the indictment lays out:

“On the morning of January 6, an agent of the Defendant contacted a United States Senator [Johnson] to ask him to hand-deliver documents to the Vice President. The agent then facilitated the receipt by the Senator’s staff of the fraudulent certificates signed by the Defendant’s fraudulent electors in Michigan and Wisconsin, which were believed not to have been delivered to the Vice President or Archivist by mail.”

In addition, eight Republican senators voted to sustain objections to the actual electors: Tommy Tuberville, Rick Scott, Roger Marshall, John Kennedy, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Cynthia Lummis.

Ted Cruz took to the floor of the Senate and called for a 10 day “emergency audit” of the election, which could have provided Trump with enough time to roll out his military declaration and seize complete control of the nation. Co-conspirators or useful idiots?

Around 2 pm, in the middle of the riot, Trump called Senator Mike Lee, thinking he had the private cell number for Tommy Tuberville.

In a 10-minute conversation, Trump asked Lee to join Tuberville and others in objecting to the actual electors; the call was cut short when the senators were evacuated because the mob had just broken into the Senate chambers.

Then Rudy Giuliani called Lee a few minutes later, this time leaving a voicemail for Tuberville on Lee’s phone saying:

“Sen. Tuberville? Or I should say Coach Tuberville. This is Rudy Giuliani, the President’s lawyer. I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you.”

Tuberville, of course, had been in Trump’s private quarters at a war room meeting at the DC Trump Hotel late into the evening of January 5th.

And then there were the House members.

Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted as Acting Attorney General because he’d promised to follow through on martial law, was recommended to Trump by Rep. Scott Perry, who was deeply involved in encouraging Mark Meadows and Trump to “stop the steal” and seize control of America.

Lauren Boebert was live-tweeting Nancy Pelosi’s position in the Capitol, after tweeting:

“Today is 1776.”

The day before the attack, Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk escorted a group of soon-to-be insurrectionists through the bowels of the Capitol, where they extensively photographed escape routes and other infrastructure.

Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks told Trump’s mob:

“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass. Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”

During the riot, Rep. Paul Gosar tweeted:

“Biden should concede. I want his concession on my desk tomorrow morning. Don’t make me come over there.”

After the January 6th coup attempt, Perry — along with Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, John Eastman and Marjorie Taylor Greene — sought a pardon from Trump for their criminal role in the effort to overthrow the US government.

The bottom line here is that Trump and his co-conspirators — a group that clearly extends far beyond the six named in Jack Smith’s indictment — were not only willing but planning to recreate Reagan’s and Nixon’s Kent State slaughter, should anybody protest their takeover of the nation.

If nothing else, that is something we all must remember, and history must record.

Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.

2). “Why American Fascists Label All Who Oppose Them as Communists”,

Is it to distract us from the actual Republican agenda, which bears a much closer resemblance to fascist states like Russia and Hungary than communism in Cuba?

Daily Take, From, The Hartmann Report, Aug 1, 2023, Thom Hartmann, at < https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-american-fascists-label-all-who-452 >

In June of 1954, Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance because his ex-wife had been a member of the Communist Party and he had described himself as a “New Deal Democrat,” which, to his inquisitors, meant “communist.”

The Soviet Union had brought down the iron curtain on their people, after all, and millions of Russians lived behind it. The USSR also had the world’s second-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and Americans lived in fear of nuclear war: I still remember the “duck and cover” drills from elementary school in the 1950s.

Now the GOP is reprising their infamous McCarthyite “Red Scare” tactics, with more on the horizon. They’re doing it to distract us from the actual Republican agenda, which bears a much closer resemblance to fascist states like Russia and Hungary than communism in Cuba.

For example, a few weeks ago, Trump — while campaigning in Iowa — said that if he becomes president again, he’s going to put an ideological test on all would-be immigrants and tourists.

“We’re going to deny entry to all communists and Marxists,” he said, mangling the word “Marxist” into “markers.” He then added, “Now, the real problem is what do we do about all the ones we already have that happen to be politicians? Nancy Pelosi! Schumer! Shifty Schiff!”

Trump’s garbled rhetoric aside, America is not suffering from a communism problem. We haven’t had a nationally elected communist politician in my lifetime, to the best of my recollection. But don’t try to tell that to Republicans.

Ted Cruz told Fox News viewers:

“Joe Biden has handed the agenda over to the socialists — and not just the socialists: This is now the Marxists. This is now the Communists.

“Today's Democratic Party believes in violence. They believe in mob rule. They believe in intimidation -- just like Marxists and Communists, they’re willing to burn our institutions to the ground to get what they want.”

Ron DeSantis is convinced our campuses are hotbeds of communism, which is why he says he had to take over the small liberal arts New College in Sarasota and stock its leadership and faculty with rightwingers:

“You can see at a college campus students flying the hammer and sickle from the old Soviet Union flag,” he told a group of cheering Republicans.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants America to know that we have sleeper communists among the top echelons of the Democratic Party:

“They have been running this plan for decades now because the same people running this country—Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi—oh, let's not forget Hillary and Bill Clinton, because they’re not out of the picture. Barack Obama. All of these people swore themselves to the communist agenda back when they were in college.”

Republicans love to rant about communism, but they almost never mention the far more imminent threat of fascism — because that’s become their main policy agenda over the past few decades.

Most of this fundamentally dishonest Republican anti-communist rhetoric began in the 1950s.

Four years after the Supreme Court ruled against racially segregated schools in their 1954 Brown v Board decision the John Birch Society was formed and, with big bucks from Fred Koch, funded a nationwide movement against the “communist agenda” of racial integration and “government schools” (as his son, David, called them when running for Vice President in 1980), including highway billboards demanding America “Impeach [Chief Justice] Earl Warren.”

In addition to not wanting white children to have to attend school with Black children, Koch and his wealthy oil baron buddies didn’t want to pay taxes to support a national social safety net. Particularly one that might help out Black people.

By this time Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was solidly in place, and America had largely made the transition into a modern form of what Europeans call “democratic socialism” or “social democracy,” with government administering the commons, and private, for-profit industry running most everything else.

We have Social Security, the minimum wage, legalized unions, Medicare, Medicaid, laws against child labor, food stamps and housing support for poor people, free public schools, government-run water, septic, and electric utilities, free public roads and highways, and a whole host of other “democratic socialist” programs. None existed before FDR.

None are communist, and none are fascist. All could be described as aspects of democratic socialism: federal, state, and local governments administer the commons and its associated social safety net (socialism) and do so with the approval of the majority of the people (democratic).

For communism to take over here would require a complete government capture, the end of all private property, and the suppression of dissent. This won’t happen here in the US because the American people wouldn’t tolerate it. In large part that’s because everybody knows that the countries that have gone communist have turned into repressive basket cases.

But wealthy interests who don’t want to pay taxes to support a strong social safety net are eager to claim that Democrats who support these all-American programs are, in fact, communists. A claim supported by their stooges like Cruz, DeSantis, and Greene.

This movement by the morbidly rich, which has fully captured the Republican Party, is led by fossil fuel and big business oligarchs who are using the social, religious, and political values of the old Confederacy to build a modern nationwide movement. They’ve built their political house on the foundation of bigotry, misogyny, and hate.

That movement, at its core, is fascist. And just like fascists of Europe in the 1930s who claimed that their main enemies were communists, these fascists label all who oppose them as commies.

They don’t actually believe that Democrats are communists, of course; they’re not that stupid. It’s just a convenient term of demonization. Fascists have always known that to enrage people to the point of violence it’s necessary to first turn their opponents into “the other,” and “communist” is a convenient all-purpose term to do that.

When Louise and I (and our kids) lived in Germany in the 1980s, we spent a lot of time living right on the East German border (the exploding land mines would wake us up when the ground around the wall thawed in the Spring).

We visited East Berlin when it was run by the Soviets (as well as visiting Belarus and Russia) and I can tell you from personal experience that communism sucked. And that it’s nothing like the social welfare state that FDR and LBJ brought to America and is widely practiced across Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Costa Rica.

But in their desire to lock down America, suppress dissent, and consolidate all the country’s wealth in the hands of a select (and white) few, today’s Republicans use lies to legitimize their fascist policies.

— The lie of “voter fraud,” for example, has led to hundreds of laws across Red States to suppress the Democratic vote, particularly in the Blue cities within those states.

— The lie that there’s no such thing as climate change has captured the GOP and paralyzed much-needed action to move America off its addiction to fossil fuels.

— The lie that Democrats drink children’s blood has convinced more than an estimated 30 million Americans that the Republican Party is the center of morality in a nation gone insane.

Historically, fascists have used “traditional values” of hierarchy and patriarchy to disempower and demonize women, queer people, minority ethnic or religious groups including Gypsies, Jews and Muslims, and those who advocate for the interests of working-class people and the poor.

They demonize these people to the point that violence against them — including state-sanctioned violence through criminalization — seems justified.

We see this rhetoric at work today in efforts to characterize gay and trans people as “groomers,” to rewrite history taught in schools to reduce empathy for Black people, and in rants on hate talk radio and Fox “News” about “BLM rioters and looters.”

Most of this is done to acquire political power, to gain the support of enough people to win elections and rule a nation. By 1937, for example, Adolf Hitler, using the same strategy, was one of the most popular politicians in the world: he was on the cover of TIME magazine that year.

Although he’d been running concentration camps for several years at that time, most of the people imprisoned in them were people who publicly protested his rule, including gays, communists, and socialists; it wasn’t until the November 1938 pogrom that he began putting large numbers of Jews into the camps.

As Helmut Walser Smith notes in an op-ed for The Washington Post:

“In the first two months of National Socialist rule, the Nazis arrested and put into ‘protective custody’ close to 50,000 people, most of them left-wing opponents. By the spring of 1934, close to 100,000 opponents of the regime had already experienced Hitler’s prisons and camps.”

Fascists, to take over a country, must present an aura of moderation, a pretense of adherence to the rule of law (while being fundamentally lawless), and weaken the impact of their own crimes by blaming their opponents of the same thing they are doing or intend to do.

Thus, as Donald Trump used the FBI and IRS against his political enemies (and promises to do so again if re-elected), the GOP is running a House committee dedicated to proving that Democrats have “weaponized” our federal government.

Trump falsely claims that Biden himself is supervising his prosecution, because that’s exactly what he will do if back in power and he wants Americans to become inured to the concept.

“They all do it,” is what Republicans want their followers to believe about American politicians of both parties, so the absolute outrageousness of their own actions is made tolerable or even welcomed.

It’s called projection and it’s a powerful political strategy that’s been used by fascists from the Nazis of old to today’s Russia and Hungary.

Once the “other” is well established in the minds of the fascist party’s followers, the next step is to criminalize protest by using the “threat” of Black or leftist “rebellion” against dissenters.

We saw this with Trump’s reaction to the protests of George Floyd’s murder and the way he tried to create a crisis by sending armed federal agents without identification insignia into Portland and Seattle to kidnap and beat up protestors, provoking a violent backlash.

That backlash — which here in Portland was pretty much limited to a few square blocks — then ran on a loop for months on Fox “News” and is still referred to by rightwing commentators as if it were a nationwide event.

Soon, those who use violence and murder against protestors — like Kyle Rittenhouse — become the heroes of the fascist movement, encouraging further suppression of dissent and the promotion of stochastic terrorism across the nation.

At that point, fascists change the laws to support their vigilantes and further suppress their opponents. A large percentage of the people Hitler arrested during the first three years of his regime, for example, were imprisoned for protesting in the streets.

According to the International Center for Not-for-profit Law, 269 bills have been introduced in 45 states criminalizing dissent against Republican policies. Forty-two have been enacted, with 15 more pending as of this writing. The ones passed into law include:

—Huge fees for permits to protest anywhere in Alabama, and jail for those who protest Republican policies without permits.
—A year in jail in Arkansas for making a sidewalk “impassable” during a protest, and a felony terrorism charge against people who cause “damage” to a “public monument.”
—Up to six years in an Arkansas prison for trespassing in the vicinity of oil or gas pipelines.
—Conspiracy charges including up to a year in an Arkansas prison for planning any protest where people — even if they are not associated with the protest or its planners — cause property damage.
—Florida criminalizing and associating huge fines with “unpermitted temporary activity or an event organized or promoted via a social media platform.”
—Redefining “riot” in Florida as “endangering the safe movement of a vehicle” (blocking traffic) and attaching a 15 year prison sentence to it. The law also allows a person (much like Kyle Rittenhouse) who kills a “rioter” to get off scott-free if the murder victim was “acting in furtherance of a riot.”
—Thirty months in an Indiana prison for trespassing on “critical infrastructure” owned by an oil or gas company, including their pipelines.
—Five years in an Iowa prison for blocking a sidewalk “during an unlawful assembly.”
—Up to four years in a Kansas prison for trespassing on pipeline facilities.
—Up to five years in a Kentucky prison for “inhibiting operations” of oil or gas companies.
—Draconian permit requirements for protesting at or near any Mississippi government buildings.
—Criminalizing “all strikes or picketing of any kind” by any government employee in Missouri.
—Two years in prison for “riot” in North Carolina. A “riot” is defined as 3 or more people and does not require property damage or injury to persons for prosecution and imprisonment.
—Ten years in prison for any similarly-defined “riot” in North Dakota.
—Immunity from prosecution for drivers who hit and kill protestors in Oklahoma.
—Felony RICO prosecution for any “three or more people” who plan an “unlawful assembly” in Oklahoma.
—Up to five years in prison for “instigating, inciting, or directing” a “riot” (which includes peaceful protest) in South Dakota. Protestors can also be individually sued into poverty by the state.
—Prison time and fines for “encouraging” rioters (also defined as peaceful protestors) in South Dakota. Don’t you dare shout from the sidelines!
—Up to 6 years in a Tennessee prison for participating in a “riot” even if there’s no physical injury or property damage.
—Felony prosecution in Texas for blocking traffic during any sort of protest.
—Up to a year in an Utah jail for protests, including silent protests, at legislative meetings.
—Eliminating criminal or civil liability for police officers who kill protestors at “unlawful assemblies,” including peaceful protests, in West Virginia.

And that’s just a partial list. The entire list is here.

The key to a fascist rise to power is to create an internal enemy, a “dangerous other,” and then use that to gain political power. In the case of today’s GOP, that’s Critical Race Theory, Drag Queen Story Hour, and trans athletes (among others).

As Education Week magazine notes:

“Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to an Education Week analysis. Eighteen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues.”

Most of these laws have provisions that allow imprisonment of teachers or educators who violate them.

The goal of today’s MAGA GOP is no less than to roll back the entire New Deal and Great Society and replace them with an authoritarian government that locks down women, suppresses the economic and political power of non-white minorities, and keeps young people in impotent poverty through debt and an obscene minimum wage.

They know that if they laid it out that way few would vote for it, so they’re following the well-trod path of 20th century European fascists and today’s Russia and Hungary (among others) by creating “internal enemies” they can demonize and use to justify laws making it harder to protest or vote.

And they have the brute force of great wealth on their side. After all, since five Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized political bribery with Citizens United, almost a hundred rightwing billionaires have begun throwing literally billions of dollars into swinging elections and buying politicians. Others are using their media and social media properties to spread the rightwing word.

Will they succeed?

Hungary, in particular, is a cautionary tale; Orbán and his morbidly rich oligarch buddies took over the country in less than a decade, mostly using fear of brown-skinned Syrian refugees as his weapon.

His main campaign slogan in 2010 was “Build a wall.” And he did: barbed wire now stretches across Hungary’s southern border. Greg Abbott, among others, seems to have learned from that lesson.

Orbán also loves to call his opponents communists. Like the GOP, it’s a convenient distraction from his fascist agenda and makes it easy to demonize his political opponents.

On the other hand, there is considerable hope and a few good signs that these fascists won’t succeed here. Americans are waking up in record numbers, particularly Zoomers. Five million mature into voting age every year, even as around 2 million Boomers die out in the same time period.

I’m optimistic, but not overconfident. We still have a lot of work to do to reclaim our politics and economy from the morbidly rich rightwingers who’ve spent the past 42 years seizing control, politician by politician, state by state, media outlet by media outlet.

When it comes to the future of democracy in the United States, the upcoming election may well be the most decisive since 1860. Double-check your voter registration, particularly if you live in a Blue city in a Red state, and help wake up friends, family, and neighbors.

America still has a chance to fulfill our founding dream of becoming an egalitarian democracy. But it’s going to take all of us.

Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.

3). US Protest Law Tracker,

The US Protest Law Tracker follows state and federal legislation introduced since January 2017 that restricts the right to peaceful assembly. For more information, visit our Analysis of US Anti-Protest Bills page.

277 entries matching in provided filters in 45 states and 1 federal, International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) at < https://www.icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker/ >

277 entries matching in provided filters in 45 states and 1 federal.

US Federal

S 4825: Penalties for protesters on interstate highways

Would prohibit “deliberately delaying traffic,” “standing or approaching a motor vehicle,” or “endangering the safe movement of a motor vehicle” on an interstate highway “with the intent to obstruct the free, convenient, and normal use of the interstate highway.” The new federal offense would be punishable by up to $10,000 and 15 years in prison—a far harsher penalty than is the case under many states' laws, which generally already criminalize walking or standing on the highway. The bill provides an exception for “any lawful activity” authorized by federal, state, or local law. However it could still seemingly cover far more than “blocking” the interstate, including a peaceful protest on the shoulder of an interstate or a convoy-style, driving protest that slowed down traffic. (See full text of bill here)

Would amend existing state law to create new criminal penalties for conduct that may occur in the course of peaceful protests near oil or gas pipelines and other infrastructure facilities. Alabama already criminalizes trespass onto "critical infrastructure," pursuant to law passed in 2016. The bill would expand the law's definition of "critical infrastructure" to include "pipelines," such that a person who trespasses onto pipeline property could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by one year in jail and a $6,000 fine. The bill would also create a new felony offense for any person who "injures," "interrupts or interferes with" critical infrastructure while trespassing. Such an act would be a Class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and $15,000. HB 36 has similar provisions in the House and was introduced January 23, 2020. (See full text of bill here)

Status: defeated / expired

Introduced 4 Feb 2020; Approved by Senate 12 March 2020

Issue(s): Infrastructure, Trespass

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Alabama

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HB 0137: Mandatory sanctions for campus protesters

Would create mandatory disciplinary sanctions that could be applied to peaceful protesters on college campuses. The bill requires the University of Wyoming and community colleges to adopt a "free speech protection policy" that includes the mandatory suspension for at least one year or expulsion of any student who is twice found responsible for "infringing upon the expressive rights of others." The bill also calls for a "range of disciplinary sanctions" to be imposed on anyone under the university's jurisdiction who "materially and substantially interferes with the free expression of others." (See full text of bill here)

Status: defeated / expired

Introduced 12 Feb 2018; Failed in House 16 Feb

Issue(s): Campus Speech

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Wyoming

SF 0074: New penalties for protests near "critical infrastructure"

Would raise potential penalties for protests near oil pipelines and other facilities by providing for the offense of "critical infrastructure trespass." The offense is defined as entering or remaining on a "critical infrastructure facility" while aware or on notice that presence is not authorized. Under the bill, critical infrastructure trespass is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of $1,000. If a person trespasses with the intent to impede the facility's operations, or damage, deface, or tamper with facility equipment, the offense is a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and a $100,000 fine. The bill also provides that an organization that "aids, abets, solicits, encourages, compensates, conspires, commands or procures" a person to commit felonious infrastructure trespass is liable to a fine of up to $1 million. "Critical infrastructure facility" is broadly defined and among many other things includes oil and gas pipelines, refineries, water treatment plants, railroad tracks, and telephone poles. (See full text of bill here)

Status: defeated / expired

Introduced 7 Feb 2018; Approved by Senate 27 Feb 2018; Approved by House 10 March 2018; Vetoed by Governor Mead 14 March 2018

Issue(s): Conspiracy, Infrastructure, Trespass

The Class Struggle

Friday, August 4, 2023

Negative Political Developments in the U.S. As Pointed out by Thom Hartmann and the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law

1). “History Must Record Trump's Plan for a Nationwide ‘Kent State’ Massacre”,

The bottom line here is that Trump and his co-conspirators were not only willing but planning to recreate Reagan’s and Nixon’s Kent State slaughter on a nationwide basis...

2). “Why American Fascists Label All Who Oppose Them as Communists”,

Is it to distract us from the actual Republican agenda, which bears a much closer resemblance to fascist states like Russia and Hungary than communism in Cuba?

277 entries matching in provided filters in 45 states and 1 federal, International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) at < https://www.icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker/ >

277 entries matching in provided filters in 45 states and 1 federal.

S 4825: Penalties for protesters on interstate highways

SB 17 / HB 21: New Penalties for Protests Near Gas and Oil Pipelines

SB 152: New controls on protest locations and costs for protest organizers

SB 115: EXPANDED DEFINITION OF "RIOT," "INCITEMENT TO RIOT," AND NEW PENALTIES FOR PROTESTERS WHO BLOCK TRAFFIC

HB 2 / SB 3: EXPANDED DEFINITION OF "RIOT," "INCITEMENT TO RIOT," AND NEW PENALTIES FOR PROTESTERS WHO BLOCK TRAFFIC

S 398: New penalties for "riot," "incitement to riot," and expanded "incitement to riot" definition

HB 516: NEW PENALTIES FOR PROTESTS NEAR GAS AND OIL PIPELINES

HB 445: Expanded definition of "riot," "incitement to riot," and new penalties for protesters who block traffic

SB 155: New justification for using deadly force near a "riot"

HB 133: Expanded definition of "riot" and "incitement to riot," and new penalties for protesters who deface monuments

SB 45: New penalties for protests near gas and oil pipelines

HB 0137: Mandatory sanctions for campus protesters

SF 0074: New penalties for protests near "critical infrastructure"

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