Closer to the Edge

04/22/2025

In the flaming chaos of modern media — where talking heads compete for virality by shouting louder, lying faster, or stoking the cheapest fire — Thom Hartmann remains an anomaly. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t pander. He doesn’t perform. Instead, he calmly walks into the noise like a seasoned librarian entering a bar fight, armed with footnotes, context, and something increasingly rare: moral clarity.

Hartmann has never needed theatrics to get your attention. He gets it by being right. Not flashy. Not smug. Just correct, precise, and grounded in actual history — the kind you can’t erase with a hashtag or a billionaire’s buyout.

You can’t talk about Thom without talking about Louise. She’s not just his wife. She’s the co-pilot, co-producer, co-writer, and the co-everything in the Hartmann universe. While Thom’s voice carried across the airwaves, Louise made sure the circuits worked, the notes were ready, the facts were double-sourced, and the publishing software hadn’t crashed mid-upload.

Theirs is not just a partnership — it’s an institution. They’ve raised children, launched nonprofits, built companies, hosted shows, and somehow made it look easy.

It isn’t. But they make it look that way.

Since 2003, The Thom Hartmann Program has been the steady, unsponsored heartbeat of progressive radio — outlasting Air America, weathering the rise of right-wing outrage factories, and refusing to drown in the algorithmic sludge that passes for public discourse.

But Hartmann’s influence goes far beyond his broadcast. In Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision, he dissected the machinery of political language with surgical precision. He explained why facts alone don’t change minds, why progressives lose arguments they should win, and why conservatives dominate the airwaves even when their ideas are trash.

“People don’t vote for what they think — they vote for what they feel.”
— Thom Hartmann, Cracking the Code

It’s not enough to be right. You have to frame it right. You have to connect. Hartmann didn’t just understand this — he taught it. He exposed the scaffolding behind every dishonest soundbite, every calculated dog whistle, every synthetic outrage cycle. And then he showed us how to fight back.

He gave progressives a playbook when most of us were still trying to win hearts with pie charts.