Thom Hartmann and Laura Belin answered attendees’ questions in this event hosted by the Heart of Iowa Democrats yesterday. Both Thom and Laura are highly knowledgeable, as you all know. A variety of topics were covered including how we got to where we are now, which Thom, as briefly as possible, explained, and most importantly, what we all should be doing.

Thom opened by discussing the conservative infrastructure that they have been putting in place for the past five or so decades that has enabled our current situation. I particularly appreciated Thom mentioning the Powell memo and not leaving out the right wing propaganda machine’s role, as most analyses of “how we got here” do.

“…This was the tail end of the McCarthy red scare period. And the Kochs got very active in that along with a whole bunch of other right-wing very wealthy people and they built this massive infrastructure which exists to this day. The Charles Koch Foundation became the Koch Institute. They started the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council…every single state has a state policy center. These are all very very well funded. They funded a couple of universities, Hillsdale College, things like that..

They bought 1,500 right-wing radio stations. They’ve got three television networks. They have a massive media and information machine that has just been cranking crap out since the 80s like there’s no tomorrow… It’s altered American public opinion. Most people will say big government is bad, not even knowing what the hell that means, for example..

This infrastructure was constructed basically to satisfy the desire of morbidly rich mostly men not to pay income taxes and to not have their businesses regulated. And that very mechanism if they just kept it to that would be bad. I mean, that was kind of Reagan bad and George Herbert Walker Bush bad and arguably even George W. Bush bad.  But that infrastructure could also be used to basically take over and destroy a nation’s democracy. And that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing.”