Thom Hartmann visited Politics Done Right on Egberto Off The Record and discussed the dire straits America is in, the mainstream media’s dereliction, and the role of independent media to mitigate it.
Thom Hartmann discusses independent media and more.
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Summary
Thom Hartmann frames the United States as teetering on the edge of oligarchy, indicts corporate-owned mainstream media for normalizing the slide, and argues that only well-organized independent outlets and grassroots activism can pull the country back from the brink.
- Hartmann traces today’s crisis to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which flooded elections with unlimited corporate cash and super-charged a 60-year conservative project to dismantle.
- He warns that economic pain has been masked by cheap credit while real wages for the bottom 90 % stagnate and top-tier incomes soar—data the Economic Policy Institute confirms.
- Six conglomerates now control the lion’s share of U.S. news outlets, allowing billionaire owners to blunt stories that threaten concentrated power.
- Hate-based “replacement” myths, anti-union propaganda, and manufactured culture wars divide working-class voters who would otherwise unite for economic justice.
- Hartmann urges activists to “get inside” the Democratic Party as precinct chairs, utilize truly independent media to educate communities, and pressure lawmakers to implement structural reforms, such as public campaign financing and antitrust enforcement.
The conversation casts independent media not as a luxury but as democracy’s last line of defense against a plutocratic takeover engineered through money, myth, and manufactured division
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Thom Hartmann’s exchange with Politics Done Right unfurls a panoramic indictment of the forces hollowing out American democracy—and a blueprint for reclaiming it. Speaking with the urgency of someone who has chronicled right-wing strategy for decades, Hartmann locates the republic’s present danger in an unbroken line that stretches from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy to the Supreme Court’s seismic 2010 Citizens United decision. That ruling, as the Brennan Center documents, blew the doors off century-old campaign-finance restraints and invited billion-dollar super-PACs to drown genuine civic debate in dark money.
Money alone, however, cannot capture a nation without narrative control. Here, Hartmann pivots to media concentration. Decades of deregulation—from the Reagan FCC’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine to the Telecommunications Act of 1996—have handed roughly ninety percent of America’s news diet to a handful of corporations. The Guardian notes that this consolidation grants an “extra level of power” to owners whose priorities rarely align with working-class interests. When the same boardrooms dictate both editorial lines and advertising streams, stories exposing tax-dodging monopolies, wage theft, or union-busting vanish, replaced by horse-race gossip and culture-war clickbait, Hartmann calls this “dumbing down by design,” and he is right: distraction is profitable, dissent is not.
Economic context deepens the crisis. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wages for the top one percent exploded by more than 160 percent since 1979, while pay for the bottom ninety percent increased by barely twenty-six percent in real terms. Cheap credit temporarily papered over the gap, but as credit lines tighten, millions discover that their apparent prosperity was a plastic mirage. Hartmann’s metaphor of the fat-cat billionaire hoarding cookies while whispering that “the Black guy wants yours” captures how racialized fear campaigns divert rage away from corporate culprits and toward scapegoats.
Yet the conversation refuses despair. Hartmann celebrates independent outlets—such as Free Speech TV, community radio, podcasts, and livestreams—that bypass corporate gatekeepers. These platforms, he argues, must do more than recycle outrage; they must “belt the show out,” translate policy into kitchen-table impacts, and speak one-to-one with audiences hungry for authenticity. That communication style, honed on Hartmann’s mic, turns passive listeners into civic actors.
Action, in his view, begins with precinct politics. The most powerful person in American democracy is not a senator but the unpaid neighborhood precinct chair who drafts party platforms and decides which candidates make the ballot. Flood those seats with progressive organizers, he contends, and the Democratic Party’s corporate drift can be reversed from within faster than any third-party experiment can gain ballot access. It is a strategy of institutional reclamation, not abandonment—echoing twentieth-century labor’s march into the New Deal coalition.
Policy reform rounds out the prescription. Publicly financed campaigns would neuter the big-donor veto. Re-empowered unions would channel productivity gains back to labor. Targeted tariffs—applied product-by-product through Congress, not by late-night social-media decree—could rebuild domestic manufacturing while respecting global labor. Antitrust enforcement would break the media and tech monopolies that warp discourse.
Crucially, Hartmann insists that narrative warfare precedes legislative victory. Progressive communicators must debunk the “great replacement” and “feminazi” dog whistles with empathetic storytelling that shows white working-class voters how xenophobia props up wage suppression. They must expose how abortion bans and anti-trans crusades serve as smokescreens for wealth transfers upward. And they must connect every pocketbook struggle—soaring grocery prices, medical debt, mortgage stress—to policy choices made in boardrooms and bought in legislatures.
The stakes, Hartmann warns, are existential: either Americans rebuild a multiracial democracy that centers human dignity, or the nation slides into an apartheid oligarchy where elections are costly theater and dissenting voices fall silent. Independent media sits at the fulcrum of that choice. When corporate anchors parrot false equivalence, independent broadcasters must name fascism. When billionaires market austerity as “freedom,” grassroots groups must translate budget jargon into tangible consequences, such as school closures and empty prescriptions.
Ultimately, Hartmann’s message is a call to agency. Democracy is not a spectator sport; it is a contact sport. Every podcast share, every door knock, every precinct meeting chisels away at the narrative fortress erected by oligarchic money. The path is uphill, but history vindicates those who climb. In that struggle, independent media is both the lantern lighting the route and the megaphone rallying the marchers.
