There’s a Straight Line from a Child-Murderer to Donald Trump’s Treason

The roots and brutality of the January 6th coup attempt grew in the soil of libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s writings

Thom Hartmann
12 min readJan 31, 2021
Photo by Alison Courtney on Unsplash

Many Americans are baffled by the Republican Party’s embrace of a billionaire sociopath and elected Republicans’ willingness to overlook the death of five Americans, including a police officer, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.)

But it’s not just power politics; the roots of this movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, to a real estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice.

Thus, Republican policies over the past 40 years not only gutted America’s middle class, but led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led. Many Americans are now so confused about how government should work that they’ve embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory positing Trump as a sort of messiah.

The Libertarians

Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a political party to…

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Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann

Written by Thom Hartmann

America’s #1 progressive talk show host & NY Times bestselling author. Thom’s writings also appear at HartmannReport.com.

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