Hope: What Good Journalism & Citizens Rising Up Can Accomplish

In yesterday’s DM, we celebrated a victory for the free press and how The Guardian stood up to Trump’s $250 million lawsuit against them and won. We also honored writers like Mary Trump, Gil Duran and Thom Hartmann.  

Surely Common Dreams deserves a shout-out as well for the perspective they lend on behalf of a living democracy. Just recently, they offered an article by Thom Hartmann on a story I knew nothing about.*

They reveal how, when John Adams was president (and Jefferson vice president and of another party), Adams became more and more authoritarian to the point of jailing numerous newspaper editors who disagreed with him. He sought a war with France in order to bolster his political fortunes, since political togetherness often happens in times of war  (cf. Trump currently threatening war with Venezuela as his poll numbers tumble).

The battle that saved democracy occurred less in the government, since Adams’ party held both houses of Congress (sound familiar?) and more in state government and citizen resistance around the country. And how Jefferson and these more “local” movements eventually won the day and saved American democracy.

As Hartmann puts it, Adams was leading the United States in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his Party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.    

Adams shut down almost 30 newspapers and threw publishers, editors, and writers into prison. But pamphleteers that generation’s version of Substack writers not affiliated with national publications—went to work, papering towns from New Hampshire to Georgia with posters and leaflets decrying Adams’ power grab and encouraging the state governments to stand tall with Thomas Jerrerson.  People responded with protests in the streets. Adams employed the army to threaten protestors, but the states fought back.

The key was to keep the protests non-violent. Jefferson knew that peaceful protests had greater power than police violence or even threats like Trump’s war-mongering against Venezuela today.

By the election of 1800, “the abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds” that Jefferson was elected, freed the imprisoned newspaper editors, and the Federalist Party began its slide into oblivion two decades later. “As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now,” comments Hartmann.  

It is a story of hope because it is a story of the people, inspired by alternative media, standing up to despotic power grabs.

In his book on The Last President, Hartmann tells the story of how “America’s Voting Rights were stolen in 2024.” It is not a story I have seen covered in the dominant media. He calls it Jim Crow 2.0…an old-fashioned, systematic campaign of voter suppression similar to the ones that characterized the fifty years or so following the collapse of Reconstruction. The media still has yet to acknowledge it, he declares.  

Under the claim of “voter fraud”—something so rare that you’re more likely to be hit by lightning than to ever encounter it—4.7 million voters were purged from voter rolls before the election. The purgings especially hit the black voter population hard in Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia, where black ballots were flagged twice the rate of white voters’ ballots.

It was the KKK Playbook updated for the digital age… a coordinated national strategy, organized and executed by the GOP and several mostly billionaire-funded groups aligned with it. And once again, “the mainstream media refuses to even discuss” it. In black majority counties in Georgia, the number of ballot drop boxes was slashed by 75 percent.

The result? Applying “the most conservative calculation” to the numbers, the suppression factor was “at least 2.3 percent of the vote,” or approximately 3,565,000 votes that largely would have gone to Kamala Harris. Were they properly counted, she would have topped Trump’s official count by 1.2 million votes and won the Electoral College with 286 votes, winning Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

This isn’t speculative: it’s the cold, hard math based on documented evidence from our own federal government. And it’s exactly what Republican officials designed their laws to do.**

* Thom Hartmann, “Trump Delivers Darkest Thanksgiving in US History,” Common Dreams, November 28, 2025.

**Thom Hartmann, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, pp. 99-102.

Banner Image: Presidential portraits: John Adams, by Gilbert Stuart); Thomas Jefferson, by Rembrandt Peale. Map of 1800 Electoral College votes: U.S. Geological Survey. Wikipedia Commons.

Queries for Contemplation

Do you take hope and empowerment from the stories of good journalism that stands up to power and awaken people to their own agency and to non-violent action?

Related Readings by Matthew Fox

Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ

Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society

Religion USA: Religion and Culture by way of TIME Magazine

A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jen Listug

“Warriors for Ecological and Economic Justice,” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times

Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox