To get the public to go along with the kind of radical social change that strips people of rights and privileges — and, eventually, their wealth — requires a shock to the political system which can then be exploited by a cynical political leader, his party, and their media allies.

In the second month of his reign, for example, Hitler had his Reichstag Fire, which pushed the German Parliament to pass “emergency” laws expanding his executive power and limiting the reach of parliament and the rights of average people. It ended the rights of assembly, freedom of speech and the press, protections against unlawful search and seizure, and gave him the power to designate persons and organizations as terrorists by decree.

Somewhat similarly, George W. Bush had 9/11 during his first year, which enabled him to push through the PATRIOT Act and other laws that expanded our government’s ability to surveil Americans, engage in warrantless wiretaps, access personal records, and monitor financial transactions.

Bush also established Guantánamo Bay as a center to illegally detain, torture, and even murder people without due process, did the same with multiple “black sites” around the world, and used 9/11 to falsely justify invading Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now it looks like Trump and his rightwing buddies are trying to do the same with the MAGA terror attack in Las Vegas and the American citizen and military veteran who drove his truck into a crowd in New Orleans. Republicans were all over the Sunday shows this past weekend arguing that these events mean “the southern border is wide open” and thus the Senate should quickly confirm Trump’s most radical nominees for his cabinet.

History proves it’s vital that Senators push back against the rush to judgement now being demanded by Trump and his enablers. This is exactly the sort of environment — mass violence being exploited with lies — which can turn otherwise normal people into monsters who then seize control and ultimately destroy nations from within.

Speaking specifically to Trump’s habit of spinning lies that fall on average people like an evil spell, historian and Nazi expert Richard Evans has just published a new book, Hitler’s People.

In it, he dispels the myth that the senior leadership of the Third Reich were “a group of psychopaths, a gang of criminals, a collection of outsiders, even a modern version of the most deranged and destructive Emperors of Ancient Rome and their courts.”

Instead, Evans — the acclaimed author of a famous trilogy about the Nazi era and Hitler’s rise to power — notes that for most of the senior leaders of the Third Reich the Nazi Party restored to them personal status and privilege they’d lost during the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s.

“As individuals, the perpetrators whose lives are recounted in this book were not psychopaths; nor were they deranged, or perverted, or insane, despite the portrayal of many of them as such in the media and the historical literature. …
“In most of their life, they were completely normal by the standards of the day. They came overwhelmingly from a middle-class background; there was not a single manual labourer among them. Many of them shared the conventional cultural attributes of the German bourgeoisie, were well-read, or played a musical instrument with some proficiency, or painted, or wrote fiction or poetry.”

Monsters rarely start out as monsters, and almost never proclaim themselves as such. They are made, to a large extent, by circumstance and opportunity, and — most critically — a charismatic leader who draws them into what is essentially a political cult with heavy religious and reactionary cultural tinges.

Once deeply indoctrinated into the cult, these “normal Germans” gave vent to the brutality we appear to have inherited from a common ancestor with our chimp cousins, who also routinely engage — when properly provoked and led by an alpha male — in sadistic violence.

“The Nazi regime created a framework that encouraged its followers, especially during the war, to commit acts that would have been unimaginable in other circumstances. The regime first dehumanized whole categories of people, including the mentally ill and handicapped, Slavs, Gypsies, petty criminals, the ‘asocial’ and the ‘work-shy’, and above all, of course, Jews, then ‘placed at the disposal of its followers means of violence normally beyond the reach of most people’.
“Upending the moral restraints common to all human societies in normal times, the regime made murder, cruelty, even sadism and torture legitimate, even desirable, attributes of those who worked for it.”

Expressing concern for America when truth becomes disposable in the service of a charismatic and vengeful leader, Evans notes in his book’s introduction:

“The emergence in our own time of a class of unscrupulous populist politicians who do not care whether what they are saying is true, and the massive growth of the internet and social media, have fostered a much more widespread uncertainty about truth, coupled with a disdain for evidence-based statements and the work of scholars and experts.”

This is what, he confesses, caused him to go back and re-examine his famous and widely-read previous works about the Nazis, saying bluntly that today’s American “unscrupulous populist politicians” have “prompted reflections on my earlier work” and “provided the opportunity to revisit and in some cases reconsider the conclusions I reached in it.”

And here we stand on the verge of something similar in America.

Trump and many of his followers are engaging in both direct and inferential lies to convince Americans that the terror incidents in Las Vegas and New Orleans were connected to brown people crossing our southern border, thus justifying a massive emergency response that ignores the Bill of Rights.

Even after Fox News corrected the record, noting that the terrorist in New Orleans was an American citizen and ten-year military veteran, Trump doubled down on his lie, writing on Truth Social:

“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. … What he [Biden] and his group of Election Interfering ‘thugs’ have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA.”

This is the rhetoric of hate and radicalization that leads to atrocities, and the most dangerous aspect of it all is that the American media and most politicians, by and large, refuse to identify it as such. Instead, they treat it as “Trump being Trump” or some other such nonsense. To make matters even worse, Republicans are largely silent in the face of Trump’s promise to pardon the people who sent over 170 police officers to the hospital, killing four of them.

In fact, history repeatedly tells us that unscrupulous politicians using the language of victimhood and depersonalization of “the other” have the ability to turn democratic nations and civilized people into monsters. And, most critically, people who’ve been indoctrinated this way by a psychopathic, lying leader often don’t, at the time, even realize the horror of the crimes they’ve either sanctioned or committed.

It’s like a form of temporary insanity.

We saw this in the echoes of Abu Ghraib, when thousands of American soldiers and civilian contractors — under the spell of Bush’s and Cheney’s lies — routinely committed torture and murder, then returned to slip back into polite society. Were it not for worldwide exposure and condemnation that put the Bush administration back on its heels, America might still be behaving like a rogue state.

Similarly, under the spell of a violent rightwing political cult and charismatic leader, Evans writes, even educated, middle-class men and women fail to realize how deeply they’ve fallen into the role of monster.

“It is none the less striking how Nazis and other perpetrators, in the army or the professions or the world of business, failed after the war to realize that they had committed gross violations of human decency and morality or, if they were put on trial, understand why they were in the dock.
“Many if not most of them knew, like Himmler in his Posen speech of 1942, that they were breaking the legal and moral norms accepted by most societies across the globe, but like him, they felt deeply that they were doing this in the service of a higher necessity – the future of the human race and its protection from the evil machinations of the Jews.”

The lies of the Bush administration caused Americans to commit obscene war crimes. The lies of Trump and his Republican enablers, accusing immigrants and queer people of committing horrific crimes against “innocent civilians and children,” threaten to provoke something even worse.

Trump‘s whitewashing of the murderous crimes committed on January 6th in his name — particularly if he follows through with his pardons — is normalizing in advance violent criminal behavior in the service of raw and unaccountable power for one man.

There are a few voices proclaiming the dangers of the path Trump has laid before us: Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Heather Cox Richardson, Jim Stewartson, Heidi Siegmund Cuda, Teddy Wilson, Sabrina Haake, Anne Applebaum, etc. And a few voices in the media — Ali Velshi, Rachel Maddow, and Joy Reid in particular — have tried to awaken their viewers.

This must now become the work of the mainstream media more generally, and the Democratic Party specifically.

Once the mass deportations, retributive arrests, lawsuits, and states of emergency are established it may well be too late to stop a larger national MAGA onslaught driven by fear, rage, and hate and enabled by the awesome police power of the federal and Red-state governments.

The time for politicians, reporters, and people of good faith and conscience to stand up and speak out, to take a stand against Trump’s lies and normalizing political violence, is now.

NOW READ: The scarlet F is coming for Trump — and there's nothing he can do about it

2025: The year American Oligarchy officially begins? I’m an unpaid volunteer member of the board of directors of a nonprofit that’s making use of a multi-million-dollar endowment, and working with their professional investment advisors over the years has given me insight into some of the ways the morbidly rich get richer, faster, and in ways impossible for average people: there are multiple types of investments and investment advisors that are only accessible to people or organizations that can pony up millions or hundreds of millions of dollars at a time.

Thus, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, Elon Musk (for example) went from being worth $25 billion in 2020 to $428 billion a few weeks ago. During that same time, Jeff Bezos (who apparently just censored a Washington Post comic showing him bowing down and handing a bag of money to Trump) reportedly went from $113 billion to $235 billion; similarly, three heirs to the Walmart fortune reportedly went, during the same period, from $161 billion to $317 billion. We see a similar phenomenon with members of Congress using inside information to trade stocks, something that would land you or me in jail.

Thus (as I often note here at Hartmann Report), the rich are truly getting richer while average working people have been in a downward spiral ever since Ronald Reagan’s “Revolution” changed the rules (particularly the tax rules, but also around monopolies, etc.) that once kept obscene wealth in check. Now we have a convicted criminal billionaire about to be sworn in as president with the richest cabinet in American (and, perhaps, world) history, all with an agenda of making the rich even richer. (It’s worth noting — something almost always ignored by the mainstream press — that Trump’s conviction was for using his fortune for election interference leading to a stolen 2016 election; by hiding his affair with Stormy Daniels he kept information away from the public that he believed could have led to his loss that year.)

Oligarchy is generally defined as a form of governance in which the state has been captured by the morbidly rich and the powers and institutions of government are then turned to make the rich even richer while insulating oligarchs from legal strictures, at the same time impoverishing and punishing working people and the poor. As I detailed in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, the biggest problem with oligarchy is that it’s an extremely unstable form of government and usually is only transitional (typically lasting fewer than two generations). Average people, realizing they’re being robbed blind, rise up and demand change, sometimes causing oligarchy to flip back to democracy (as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s) or flipping the nation into tyranny when the oligarchs decide to use the military and police powers of government to hold onto their wealth and power (Chile, Hungary, Russia, Iraq, Egypt, Philippines, Singapore, Turkey, etc.).

The big question for Americans as we enter this new period of full-blown oligarchy is whether this generation’s oligarchs will have more success than those in the 1930s and 1850s. They seem to have learned the lessons of history and are now emulating Putin, Orbán, etc., in using lawfare and big money to intimidate or purchase outright the media; this will make a transition back to democracy — like the ones Lincoln and Roosevelt led when the media landscape (and its ownership) was far more diverse — far more difficult. And, as we just saw with the election of Mike Johnson as Speaker, nothing happens in the House without the approval of the billionaires.

The next four years — and, in particular, the next two — will probably decide the fate of America’s form of government for the next several generations. This is no time to check out; to the contrary, it’s the most important moment in our lifetimes to stand up, speak out, and build progressive political institutions while supporting the few brave progressive politicians still standing after the billionaire and AIPAC attacks in the last election.

—Is the “Scarlet F” coming to Trump? What is the legal significance of Trump being a convicted felon? Most of America’s laws punishing convicted felons long after they’ve gotten out of jail or otherwise finished their sentences date back to the use of felony convictions in the old South to disenfranchise Black people. These include losing your ability to vote, to hold certain types of jobs, and even to own a gun. (Almost all of the states where ex-felons can’t vote are former Confederate states, which have disenfranchised over 5 million people, most nonwhite, this way.)

It appears that a loophole in Florida’s law, which forbids felons with unpaid fines from voting, will let Trump continue to cast a ballot in that state because he was convicted out-of-state (NY) rather than by a Florida court. Will he have to surrender the gun he reportedly owns? Will there be any consequence at all for him? Judge Merchan will have the first final say (I say “first” because Trump will appeal) and it’ll be interesting to see if the press focuses on Trump’s response or Merchan’s opinion, which is virtually certain to point out that Trump’s conviction is for criminally manipulating the 2016 election. I’m betting they won’t use the phrase “election interference” at all, but stay tuned…

— How the media has failed on Trump coverage. Media watchdog Dan Froomkin points out that Trump, rather than being a brilliant politician or businessman, is actually one of this century’s most successful con-men — and our media’s greatest failure is to acknowledge or even tangentially reference this fact.

He ran on lowering grocery prices, for example, telling a rally in August, “From the day I take the oath of office, we will rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again. … You just watch. They’ll come down fast.” Now, however, he says he won’t even bother because, as he told TIME magazine, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”

It reminds one of how in 2016 he promised to raise taxes on the rich so much that his wealthy friends would hate him, to replace Obamacare with a national healthcare system, to support unions and the environment, etc.; all turned out to be naked lies. But, like during his first term, as long as Trump and the Murdoch family (and now Musk) can keep Trump-humpers cocooned in their rightwing media bubble, odds are few of those who voted for him will ever know the extent of his perfidy.

As the brilliant investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who referred to Trump as “the greatest con artist in the history of the world,” told the media via Froomkin: “You’ve got to stop covering him like he’s just another politician, with a different agenda. He’s a criminal and a con artist. And that has to be central to everything you cover about him.”

Most tragically for the fate and future of our nation, even the mainstream media generally refuses to note Trump’s frequent lies and actions that directly contradict his campaign promises and press availabilities. Will our media wake up this time, particularly as Trump begins going after reporters and publishers with the force of law and agencies like the FBI? One hopes so…and we can all help by pointing it out when media agencies “sanewash” or otherwise sugar-coat Trump’s lies and anti-democracy actions.

— It looks like Net Neutrality is dead. During the Trump administration, his FCC changed the rules so that internet providers — like the company delivering the internet to your home enabling you to read this email — could “listen in” on everything you do online, from the sites your visit to reading your email. They can also sell that information, and, since that change, such information brokering has become a billion-dollar industry. President Biden’s FCC recently reversed that rule, putting the internet under the same rules as telephone service (it’s called being a “common carrier”) so your private communications and actions online are actually private. A Republican group sued Biden’s FCC and three Republicans on the notoriously conservative Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals just ruled against Net Neutrality, again giving Internet Service Providers (ISPs) full access to everything you do and say online.

Should the Trump administration — or billionaires who control large ISPs (like Musk’s Starlink) — decide, they may now be able to monitor, collect, sell, or otherwise use everything you’re doing online. This could be particularly challenging for people trying to organize legal anti-oligarch political activity.

Part of the case rested on the recent gutting of the Chevron Deference, an old Supreme Court-created doctrine that allows agencies like the FCC to promulgate rules not specifically defined in the legislation that creates and/or enables them. It’s thus one of the first shots fired in the conservative war against regulatory agencies that protect the little guy, along with our air, water, food, drugs, toys, cars, banks, etc.

The case will next go to the Supreme Court, and few are thinking Trump’s appointees there will vote to protect average people from the prying eyes of billionaires and massive corporations.

— NOT AGAIN: China downplays mystery virus deaths despite pandemic fears. Just in time for Bob Kennedy and other anti-mask, anti-vaccine folks to take control of our government, a new virus is apparently killing people in China. This one appears to be a newly-virulent mutation of an older virus, the human metapneumovirus (HMPV), which typically causes symptoms ranging from common cold-like illness to something resembling pneumonia. Reports are coming in that hospitals in some parts of China are being overwhelmed and mass graves are appearing, although it’s hard to confirm their veracity because of the draconian censorship that country imposes on its press and foreign journalists. Cases are also reportedly just now starting to pop up outside China. Keep an eye on this one…