In yesterday’s DM, we celebrated a victory for the free press and the way The Guardian stood as much as Trump’s $250 million lawsuit towards them and gained. We additionally honored writers like Mary Trump, Gil Duran and Thom Hartmann.
Absolutely Widespread Desires deserves a shout-out as effectively for the attitude they lend on behalf of a dwelling democracy. Only recently, they provided an article by Thom Hartmann on a narrative I knew nothing about.*
They reveal how, when John Adams was president (and Jefferson vp and of one other celebration), Adams turned increasingly more authoritarian to the purpose of jailing quite a few newspaper editors who disagreed with him. He sought a struggle with France with a purpose to bolster his political fortunes, since political togetherness usually occurs in instances of struggle (cf. Trump at the moment threatening struggle with Venezuela as his ballot numbers tumble).
The battle that saved democracy occurred much less within the authorities, since Adams’ celebration held each homes of Congress (sound acquainted?) and extra in state authorities and citizen resistance across the nation. And the way Jefferson and these extra “native” actions ultimately gained the day and saved American democracy.
As Hartmann places it, Adams was main the US within the path of a fascistic state with a spectacularly profitable technique of vilifying Jefferson and his Occasion as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere close to as poisonous or psychopathic.
Adams shut down virtually 30 newspapers and threw publishers, editors, and writers into jail. However pamphleteers that technology’s model of Substack writers not affiliated with nationwide publications—went to work, papering cities from New Hampshire to Georgia with posters and leaflets decrying Adams’ energy seize and inspiring the state governments to face tall with Thomas Jerrerson. Folks responded with protests within the streets. Adams employed the military to threaten protestors, however the states fought again.
The important thing was to maintain the protests non-violent. Jefferson knew that peaceable protests had larger energy than police violence and even threats like Trump’s war-mongering towards Venezuela immediately.
By the election of 1800, “the abuses of the Federalists had been so burned into the folks’s minds” that Jefferson was elected, freed the imprisoned newspaper editors, and the Federalist Occasion started its slide into oblivion 20 years later. “As could effectively occur to Trump’s GOP two or 4 years from now,” feedback Hartmann.
It’s a story of hope as a result of it’s a story of the folks, impressed by different media, standing as much as despotic energy grabs.
In his e-book on The Final President, Hartmann tells the story of how “America’s Voting Rights had been stolen in 2024.” It’s not a narrative I’ve seen coated within the dominant media. He calls it Jim Crow 2.0…an old school, systematic marketing campaign of voter suppression much like those that characterised the fifty years or so following the collapse of Reconstruction. The media nonetheless has but to acknowledge it, he declares.
Beneath the declare of “voter fraud”—one thing so uncommon that you simply’re extra prone to be hit by lightning than to ever encounter it—4.7 million voters had been purged from voter rolls earlier than the election. The purgings particularly hit the black voter inhabitants onerous in Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia, the place black ballots had been flagged twice the speed of white voters’ ballots.
It was the KKK Playbook up to date for the digital age… a coordinated nationwide technique, organized and executed by the GOP and a number of other principally billionaire-funded teams aligned with it. And as soon as once more, “the mainstream media refuses to even focus on” it. In black majority counties in Georgia, the variety of poll drop packing containers was slashed by 75 p.c.
The outcome? Making use of “essentially the most conservative calculation” to the numbers, the suppression issue was “a minimum of 2.3 p.c of the vote,” or roughly 3,565,000 votes that largely would have gone to Kamala Harris. Had been they correctly counted, she would have topped Trump’s official rely by 1.2 million votes and gained the Electoral School with 286 votes, profitable Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
This isn’t speculative: it’s the chilly, onerous math based mostly on documented proof from our personal federal authorities. And it’s precisely what Republican officers designed their legal guidelines to do.**
* Thom Hartmann, “Trump Delivers Darkest Thanksgiving in US Historical past,” Widespread Desires, November 28, 2025.
**Thom Hartmann, The Final American President: A Damaged Man, a Corrupt Occasion, and a World on the Brink, pp. 99-102.
Banner Picture: Presidential portraits: John Adams, by Gilbert Stuart); Thomas Jefferson, by Rembrandt Peale. Map of 1800 Electoral School votes: U.S. Geological Survey. Wikipedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you’re taking hope and empowerment from the tales of fine journalism that stands as much as energy and awaken folks to their very own company and to non-violent motion?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
Trump & The MAGA Motion as Anti-Christ
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Reworking Evil in Soul & Society
Faith USA: Faith and Tradition by means of TIME Journal
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Consciousness with Social Justice
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Items for the Peoples of the Earth
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Imaginative and prescient of Love and Motion by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jen Listug
“Warriors for Ecological and Financial Justice,” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Occasions
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Imaginative and prescient For a New Technology by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
