This document is part of an archive of postings by John Ray on Dissecting Leftism, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
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September 30, 2024
This is Israel’s greatest victory since the Six-Day War
There is a satirical Israeli song from the Second Lebanon War, ‘Yalla Ya Nasrallah’, with the chorus: ‘Come on, oh Nasrallah/We will screw you, inshallah/we’ll send you back to Allah/with the rest of Hezbollah’. The lyrics are doggerel, but I mention it for two reasons. One, it’s an absolute banger of a tune and, two, all that it threatened has now been carried out. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah for 32 years, was killed last night in an IDF strike on the Islamist terror group’s underground command centre beneath a Beirut suburb.
“Yalla ya Nasrallah,
We will f*ck you Inshallah,
We will return you to Allah,
With the entire Hezbollah” pic.twitter.com/bMa6VuQwXH
His death is the latest in a series of targeted killings on the leaders of Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy force armed and funded to strengthen Tehran’s grip on the region. These assassinations have included Ibrahim Aqil, commander of Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces unit, along with its chief of staff Hussein Ahmad Dahraj, chief of operations Hassan Yussef Abad Alssatar, head of training Abu Hussan Samir, and others. It has included Ibrahim Qubaisi, head of the rocket and missile division, and Muhammad Hussein Srour, chief of drones and aerial defences. To give a sense of the speed and efficiency of Israel’s operations, all of these targets were killed in the last seven days. Hezbollah has terrorised Israel for almost 40 years and now Israel has eliminated almost its entire chain of command in a week. This represents years, probably decades, of planning and intelligence gathering against one of the most heavily armed forces in the region. As daring and improbable Israeli military victories go, it is up there with the Six-Day War.
Nasrallah’s death brings to an end the reign of a brutal butcher responsible for the deaths of many more Arabs than Israelis. Under his command, Hezbollah not only sided with Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war but took part in the large-scale killing of opposition fighters and civilians, including in Aleppo, Qusair, and Daraya. There’s a reason Syrians took to the streets last night to celebrate. They won’t be the only ones. Nasrallah’s death will be welcomed by the Druze of Majdal Shams, a town in the Israeli Golan Heights, where 12 Arab children were blown up by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer in July. It was one of 9,300 rockets Hezbollah has fired at Israel since 8 October, when it decided to join in the Hamas offensive of the previous day. All across the Middle East, in countries where denouncing the Zionist entity is a national pastime, prime ministers and peasants will privately respond to the news of Nasrallah’s demise with the same sentiment: the bastard had it coming.
Not everyone will see it that way, of course. Naturally, Iran won’t be happy. For the past year, it has watched (read: directed) Hezbollah and its other front group Hamas to launch attacks on Israel, only for Israel to respond with overwhelming force and tactical nous, taking out top commanders left and right. The financial cost to Iran in lost investment and hardware must be eye-watering. That will factor into what comes next. If Iran does not respond dramatically — it needn’t be all that effective, it just has to look good on CNN — then it will be a much weakened force in the region. Yet if it does, it risks a spate of targeted assassinations against its own leadership or, if the situation is allowed to escalate, some kind of direct engagement with Israel. Whatever their more hawkish elements say, neither country wants that. Regardless of what Iran does, it will now have to factor in that Israel is a far stronger, much emboldened enemy.
This is a historic victory for the Jewish state and its scale can be measured in the outrage with which it is greeted and the parties expressing it. Israel will be decried at the United Nations and calumnied by the human rights industry. It will be accused of war crimes by law professors from some of the finest universities in the world and charged with dangerous escalation by journalists who consider Israel’s mere existence an escalation. There will be indignation at the US State Department, the British Foreign Office and the European Commission, all of which will now have to spin this latest setback for Iran as another reason to revive the deadly foolish nuclear deal. Rest assured that all the right people are unhappy right now.
Hassan Nasrallah has plagued the Israeli psyche for so long that his death will come as a relief as much as a sense of triumph. But a triumph it is, another reminder that however long it takes, whatever the cost in blood and treasure, Israel always gets its man in the end. Jerusalem has reasserted this message in the most spectacular way. Yalla ya Nasrallah.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/this-is-israels-greatest-victory-since-the-six-day-war/
**************************************************The rise of the expertocrats
‘You are in danger!’ This is how the rhetoric starts. ‘But there is no need to not worry, we will fix it!’
There is a sad irony in this message. The government pretends to offer therapeutic words by identifying a problem only it can fix.
The problem is one of Iatrogenesis.
Derived from the Greek iatros, it means harm brought forth by the healer.
The illness is actually a product of the help offered by the government. The pain comes from the source of the cure. The foundation of the grief is derived from those who declare the loudest, ‘We care the most!!!’
It can become wearying for citizens to identify how often this happens in the self-destroying West. Yet, even under these somewhat bleak conditions, hope can be seen.
The Iatrogenic process starts with some form of legislative or ideological creep.
Authors such as Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier have identified the pattern. The slide starts from a seemingly harmless point, usually a pattern of ill-ease of dysfunction within society. This pattern is then given a label.
Labelling is often akin to pouring accelerant on a fire, particularly if done by an expert.
Without this perceived professional help, the expert can quickly become redundant in society. The economics of their livelihood can be in doubt. An expert on gender studies needs confusion about gender or else, why would their advice be sought? What do some experts do? They embrace strategies that raise the value of their information. This is best achieved by creating an expectation that there will be alarming consequences if their advice is not sought or acted upon. And that help is not cheap. I call this system, ‘expertocracy’.
Expertocracy can be found lurking, lounging, and licentiously lingering in the halls of bureaucracy. Some may call this the ‘technocracy’, but I resist that label. Many experts are terrible at the technical aspects of their profession.
Being an expert is a matter of opinion based on influence. It is even possible to remain part of the expertocracy while making matters worse.
Why ‘licentiously lingering’?
There is an inherent sensuality about those in the expertocracy. They tend to be emotivists who promise to make people ‘feel better’.
The current plaything of the expertocracy is environmental alarmism.
When pressured on their Net Zero logic, the response from ministers is often shallow, incoherent, and avoidant. They cannot explain the continuation of the nuclear embargo other than insisting ‘trust us’. They avoid at all costs engaging with the salient dialogue of Bjorn Lomborg, Ian Plimer, and Steven Koonin.
Koonin summarises his technical findings:
‘In short, the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.’
His advice concludes, ‘A prudent step would be to pursue adaptation strategies more vigorously … so the best strategy is to promote economic development and strong institutions in developing countries in order to improve their ability to adapt.’
How can it be that our economic leaders do not understand that giving taxpayers back their own money in the form of ‘subsidies’ decreases the productive value of that money? Why not allow them to keep it?
‘Here sir, give them this money and they will thank you for saving them. There will be an inflation number that looks good…’
That this number is a facsimile of reality rarely matters to them.
Education and counselling are two other extremely important industries that are currently under the thumb of expertocrats. They preach the loudest about an existential crisis surrounding the mental health of our young.
When a young person is unhappy, they can be described as having increased anxiety disorder or experiencing a state of depression (an example of concept creep).
If these emotionally compromised people see their peers being more successful, they claim it is an example of racism or a lack of equality (two concepts primary to critical race theory). Expertocrats working in this field have decided that ‘helping’ means limiting those who can access training and addressing the language used to explain history and social roles.
Shrier often describes how these unreal approaches to the feelings of young people have led them to learn irresponsibility through moral avoidance in decision-making. In her words:
‘In the last generation, all traces of tough love and rule-bound parenting have been supplanted by a more empathetic style… The approach to bad behaviour is always therapeutic – meaning it is non-judgemental.’
Non-judgemental in this context means failing to hold young people responsible for their part in creating problems for others.
As a young teacher from a Sydney-based university told me, ‘You mean, I am allowed to implement consequences?’
The idea that this requires permission helps explain why our classes are failing in their duty to be places of learning and are instead turning into environments that placate the emotive fickleness of the young.
Non-judgementalism in counselling helps young people perpetuate a scenario where they avoid taking responsibility for their role in the pain they are experiencing. Perhaps they did not study hard enough, and that is why they failed a test. Maybe they made poor choices in friendship groups or activities. These sorts of things. Critical Race Theory reinforces the idea that their pain is created by oppression – either from an individual or the ‘structural oppression’ of society.
The wider this ideology spreads, the more dependent people become on experts and their expertocracy.
They seek answers from experts rather than looking at themselves.
Doug Stokes explained: ‘Virtue no longer consists of what you “do or don’t do”; it consists of having the correct opinions … in short, it is a power-play wrapped in a trauma shield; obey me and do as I tell you, or you will harm the vulnerable groups and I will seek to cast you out.’
Stokes posits that a response against the expertocracy is coming.
‘How long will ordinary people put up with being denigrated, told their country is beyond redemption, and accept forms of elite restructuring of the institutions they hold dear?’
Perhaps the battle over the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill will show us if the reaction against the expertocracy is coming … or not
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-rise-of-the-expertocrats/
***************************************September 29, 2024
French women are afraid. But the country’s politicians don’t seem to care
In a country that has become accustomed to atrocities in the last decade, the brutal murder of a 19-year-old student has outraged France. The body of the young woman, named only as Philippine, was discovered last Saturday in the Bois de Boulogne, a famous park in the west of Paris. She had gone missing on Friday afternoon, shortly after eating lunch in her university canteen.
On Tuesday evening, the authorities in Geneva, acting on information provided by French police, arrested a man as he arrived on a train from Annecy. The man in custody is a 22-year-old Moroccan who had entered France from Spain on June 13, 2019 on a tourist visa. He was 17 at the time so a child welfare authority took him under their wing. Three months later he raped a 23-year-old student.
In 2021, he was sentenced to seven years in prison but he was released into a retention centre in June this year and ordered to be deported to Morocco. The problem was he had no formal identification papers; France asked Morocco to send the relevant documentation so the deportation order could be processed. It was many weeks before Morocco responded. In the interim, a court had freed the man even though the judge acknowledged he presented a risk. He was ordered to report daily to the local gendarmerie. He didn’t. He made his way to Paris.
Philippine’s cruel misfortune was to cross paths with her killer in the Bois de Boulogne as she enjoyed the September sunshine last Friday.
My 19-year old daughter is a student in Paris. Her hall of residence is 700 metres from the Bois de Boulogne. She likes to stroll around the neighbourhood. All week my mind has been troubled by what might have been.
The right in France reacted to the news of the arrest with a mix of fury and disbelief. ‘Philippine’s life was stolen from her by a Moroccan migrant under an OQTF,’ posted Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, on social media. ‘This migrant therefore had no place on our soil, but he was able to reoffend with complete impunity. Our justice system is lax, our state is dysfunctional, our leaders let the French live with human bombs. It is time for this government to act.’
An OQTF is a deportation order (obligation de quitter le territoire français), which are issued to foreign nationals who are not wanted in France.
A Senate report in 2023 estimated that there are 700,000 people in France subject to deportation orders, the vast majority of whom are at liberty as there are only 1,800 places in retention centres.
In an interview in 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that only 12 per cent of these orders were being executed but he promised this would soon change. He mentioned the figure of 100 per cent. In fact, the execution rate has fallen to seven percent; the EU average is 30 per cent.
Justice is lax in France
In October 2022, a 12-year-old Parisian girl, Lola, was raped and murdered, allegedly by an Algerian woman who was subject to a deportation order. In April this year, Lola’s 49-year-old father suffered a fatal heart attack. The family’s lawyer attributed his death to the ‘hell’ he had endured since the murder of his daughter.
In the days after Lola’s death, Macron’s government spokesman, Olivier Veran, acknowledged that ‘we obviously need to do better’ in deporting unwanted foreign nationals. But they haven’t done better. Last year in Lille, a retired nurse was raped and murdered by an Ivorian in the country illegally. The victim’s sister-in-law declared that ‘the French people are in danger and the State is not doing its job’.
There was a similar sentiment from Claire, a Parisian who was raped last year in her home by a man who should have been deported. ‘Every week, we hear stories of women assaulted by people subject to OQTFs,’ said Claire. ‘I want to speak out to warn women that we are no longer safe in France, even in a neighbourhood we think is safe.’
Claire was vilified by some on the far-left and accused of racism.
Minutes after details were released about the man arrested in connection with Philippine’s death Sandrine Rousseau, a MP in the left-wing coalition, tweeted that ‘the far right will try to take advantage of this to spread its racist and xenophobic hatred’.
The anger of many millions in France, not just the ‘far-right’, is directed as much against the state as the perpetrators. They agree with Claire that women are no longer safe. A culture of denial runs parallel with institutional inefficiency, putting women in jeopardy.
On Wednesday morning, the Socialist MP Francois Hollande denied the charge of lax justice, insisting that ‘it is severe’. Hollande was the president of the Republic between 2012 and 2017, a period when the rot set in. His justice minister, Christiane Taubira, cancelled the construction of 24,000 additional prison places and then issued a circular to judges ordering them to issue lighter sentences so as not to overcrowd prisons.
The justice minister in Michel Barnier’s new government is Didier Migaud, another Socialist. On Tuesday morning, hours before news of the arrest in Geneva, he had scoffed at suggestions that soft sentencing was endangering its citizens. ‘I believe there’s no such thing as lax justice,’ he said. ‘We need to convince those who think there is.’
Justice is lax in France. Migaud needs to be convinced of it before another family suffers the agony that Philippine’s is experiencing.
***************************************
September 26, 2024
Hope for conservatism in Canada
Some readers might recall that three months ago Trudeau’s Liberal party in Canada suffered a terrible by-election blow when it lost an inner-city Toronto seat that had been held by the Liberals for aeons. To the shock of many, this past June Team Trudeau lost this blue-ribbon inner Toronto seat to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by 633 votes. That was bad for Justin. It was also bad for Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal party Deputy Prime Minister, as this by-election loss was for a seat that was next door to her own in the inner-city heartlands of Toronto.
(Second note to readers: the opposition Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre did not throw together lefty policies to try to cater to this inner-city seat full of wokesters. He simply explained how real conservative policies would help them; he shunned all the focus group risk-averse crap; and he ran knowing he could easily win the next general election without such seats but that if the voters in this inner-city constituency wanted to jettison Trudeau they’d be most welcome to come aboard a party with actual conservative values and policies. This approach produced a stunning upset win.)
That was three months ago in June. Then just two weeks ago there were two more by-elections in Canada. One was in Manitoba in the west of Canada where the Liberals generally do badly (to the extent that in the 1980 general election the Liberals won a majority government while taking only two seats, all up, in the four western provinces). And in this just held Manitoba by-election the Liberal candidate won – wait for it – only 4.8 per cent of the vote. Ouch! That is strikingly bad even for the Liberal party in western Canada. The other by-election from two weeks ago took place in Montreal in one of the most historically famous Liberal party constituencies in the country. At the last general election the Liberals had won the seat by over 10,000 votes. Yet in this by-election they lost the seat by 248 votes to the separatist French-Canadian party the Bloc Quebecois that only runs candidates in Quebec. The Liberals gained only 27 per cent of the vote in the by-election. This, by the way, is a riding or constituency that has been held by a former Canadian Liberal prime minister. Hence this was a very, very bad result for Justin.
And what was the Canadian Prime Minister’s response to these two brutal by-election defeats? You can’t make this up. It was a combination of two things.There was the trite, vacuous, vapid, hackneyed, platitudinous slogans that up until recently had served Justin so well – ‘there is lots to reflect on’ and ‘we need to stay focused’ type verbiage. And then there was the blame-shifting founded on a core level sanctimony and smugness. After the two by-election losses Trudeau announced that, ‘Canadians need to be more engaged.’ Got that? He seems to think that he lost because the dumb plebs and Hillary Clinton-type deplorables weren’t paying attention to all the supposedly good things he and his government were doing. (Leave aside that on nearly every front the Canadian economy is bad, the government’s ‘accomplishments’ near-on non-existent and the Trudeau carbon tax is massively unpopular.
Pierre Poilievre promises to get rid of the Trudeau carbon tax; get rid of the federal EV mandate; and get rid of the Trudeau ban on crude oil tankers off British Columbia’s north coast. The lefties are saying Poilievre will ‘lay waste to Trudeau’s environmental legislative legacy’. Oh, and don’t forget that Mr Poilievre continues to pledge to halve the budget of the national broadcaster CBC TV and to turn the broadcaster’s posh head offices into social housing units. When a leader is chosen by the paid-up party members – as in Canada, where there are now over 750,000 Conservative party members who alone can vote for leader and only they can remove him – you can observe this thing known as ‘a backbone’ in right-of-centre party leaders because the views of the party room Black Hand types do not determine policy.)
As I said at the start, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is in deep, deep do-do. He is in his ninth year as PM. His first election win was a big majority government followed by two minority government wins. When Trudeau first won office back in 2015 he scored 63 per cent approval, a sky-high number. Today, after the left-wing economic policies, all the lockdown thuggery, the waning appeal of his vapid pretty boy routine, Trudeau’s approval rating sits at 28 per cent. A few Liberal party MPs are starting to say out loud that Justin should step down.
Polls have consistently shown Trudeau’s Liberals to be about 20 – yes, 20 – points behind Poilievre’s Conservatives. (And in my entire life I don’t recall a Tory party that far ahead in the polls. The Tories lead in every province save Quebec. A couple of recent polls have indicated the Liberals might come in fourth – yes, fourth – in the next election. There are now 343 MPs in Canada’s Lower House, the House of Commons, and some polls put in doubt whether the Liberals can win even 35 of those 343 – so just inner-city Montreal, the bureaucratic capital city of Ottawa (which is like Canberra in being allergic to conservative outlooks), and maybe a few inner-city Toronto ones.
All of this is why the further-left NDP party earlier this month tore up its minority government coalition agreement with Trudeau’s Liberal party. Canada has five-year terms and the next election could be dragged out till as late as next October. But the NDP is just watching to see when a general election might see it replace the Libs as the main party of the left. It’s balancing that against the clear likelihood of a big Tory win and postponing that for another while. But the odds of the NDP pulling the plug on Trudeau go up with every bad poll and every passing day.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/canadian-lessons-for-the-coalition/
*************************************************Get Ready for Another Mail-In Ballot Fiasco
Many states are sending out mail-in ballots now for the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Yet at the same time that so many more voters are depending on the mail to cast their ballots, the two leading national organizations of election officials wrote the U.S. Postal Service to demand immediate action to avoid confusion and chaos with mail-in ballots.
“We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” wrote the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.”
According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, mail-in ballots accounted for 43% of the electorate in 2020, an increase of 20 percentage points from 2016.
The letter’s list of problems should alarm anyone thinking of voting through the mail instead of going to a polling place to vote in person. That includes U.S. Postal Service staff nationwide who “are uninformed about USPS policies around election mail,” resulting in “significantly delayed, or otherwise improperly processed” absentee ballots.
“Timely postmarked ballots” are being received “10 or more days after postmark,” the election officials wrote, demonstrating USPS’s “inability to meet their own service delivery deadlines.”
This letter follows a July report from the USPS Office of Inspector General, which warned that its audit of primaries in 13 states found that 2.99% of mail-in ballots reached voters too late and 1.83% were returned to election offices after their legal deadlines. Its list of horror stories included the discovery that “local management at one facility stated they were not aware primary Election Day was that week.”
That means that almost 5% of voters are being disenfranchised, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of votes across the country.
There are reports of other nightmares. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said he is “extremely concerned” that in the August primary, 2% of ballots sent by mail were not counted “due to USPS administrative failures.”
“The Pony Express is more efficient at this point,” said Schwab.
In July, Utah had a photo-finish Republican congressional primary where the victory margin was 176 votes. But nearly 1,200 mail-in ballots were not counted because they were first sent to a Las Vegas distribution center and not postmarked on time. Most of those ballots were in a county that was carried 2 to 1 by the candidate who ultimately lost.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has sued Nevada officials for failure to fix obvious errors on the voter rolls. The organization has found hundreds of questionable voter addresses that include strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants.
“Nevada’s policy of automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter makes it essential that election officials have accurate voter rolls and are not mailing ballots to addresses where no one lives,” the legal foundation notes.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation also points out that in 2022, Nevada’s U.S. Senate race was decided by 7,928 votes, which determined party control of that body. Nevada’s secretary of state, PILF noted, “published figures showing that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or ‘bad’ addresses and another 8,036 were rejected upon receipt.” Also: “Another 1.2 million ballots never came back to officials for counting.”
This year, Nevada has another competitive Senate race that could determine the Senate majority.
Nationwide, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports that of the almost 91 million mailed ballots sent to voters in all states in 2020, only 70 million were returned.
What happened to the others? Some weren’t filled out. But other completed ballots were probably lost by an increasingly inefficient Postal Service.
And election officials complained in their letter to the USPS that election mail being “sent to voters” is being returned as “undeliverable” at a “higher than usual rate.” Some voters registered more than once got more than one ballot.
At least 1.1 million ballots went to outdated addresses. Some may have gone to vacant lots and businesses. Some 500,000 were rejected by election officials when they were returned, often due to voter errors that could have been corrected by election officials if the voters had cast their ballots in person.
Registration lists are notoriously chock-full of ineligible, duplicate, fictional, and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited to commit fraud. Ballots cast by mail can become the object of intimidation and vote-buying schemes.
In 2005, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker pointed out that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
The New York Times admitted in 2012 that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.”
Little has changed. In 2019, a congressional race in North Carolina was thrown out over mail-in ballots gathered through illegal vote trafficking. A judge ordered a new election in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, mayor’s race last year after a video appeared to show two women stuffing large numbers of suspect absentee ballots into drop boxes.
In New York, three Rensselaer County officials are on trial this month, accused of mail-in ballot fraud. A former GOP elections commissioner who has already pleaded guilty testified that looser post-COVID mail-in procedures make it much easier to commit voter fraud.
Before Election Day, Postal Service officials must address concerns about delays and mishandling of absentee ballots. Sloppy U.S. voting rules on everything from vote trafficking by third parties to lax or nonexistent ID laws in many states make it vital there be election observers watching every aspect of the voting and tabulation process.
And after the weeks of litigation and delays in counting that a tsunami of mail-in ballots will no doubt create, we should rethink the advice of those who disparage in-person voting and assure us “that the ballots are in the mail.”
After all, if you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket in or appear in person to claim your jackpot?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/25/get-ready-another-mail-in-ballot-fiasco/
***************************************In Speech on Economy, Trump Calls for ‘New American Industrialism’
“To the autoworkers in Michigan, Georgia, and all other parts of our country, I am pinpointing you for greatness,” former President Donald Trump said in a campaign speech on Tuesday.
In a rally held in Savannah, Georgia, Trump laid out his economic vision for the United States if he is reelected in November. His message focused on reviving domestic manufacturing.
Georgia is a key swing state that’s being courted heavily by both Trump and his Democratic opponent for the presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump called his economic policies “new American industrialism,” where the focus will be on bringing offshored manufacturing jobs back to the United States. The 45th president said that, for years, other countries have stripped American jobs and wealth, but added he would “put America first.”
He said that under his leadership “American workers will no longer be worried about losing [their] jobs to foreign nations. Instead, foreign nations will be worried about losing their jobs to America.”
While many vital industries have moved to other counties in recent years, Trump said, he has a plan to bring them back and restore American prosperity.
“This New American Industrialism will create millions of jobs, massively raise wages for American workers, and make the United States into a manufacturing powerhouse,” he said. “We will be able to build ships again. We will be able to build airplanes again. We will become the world leader in robotics. The U.S. auto industry will once again be the envy of the planet.”
To make that happen, the former president said he would incentivize American companies to hire American workers while reducing burdens to economic growth:
I will give you the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burden, and free access to the best and biggest market on the planet—but only if you make your product here in America and hire American workers for the job.
If you don’t make your product here, then you will have to pay a very substantial tariff when you send your product into the United States.
Trump proposed lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% for companies that make their products in the U.S. Harris has proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 28%. The rate currently is 21%.
The former president said that his policies—which focus on rebuilding American industry and creating energy independence—would strengthen the American economy, but that Harris’ policies were too “radical” and would damage the country. He said that while Harris was fine with jobs going overseas, she would place heavy taxes on American companies.
“Kamala the tax queen is demanding a 33% tax hike on all domestic production,” Trump said. This will make companies flee elsewhere, he said.
Worse, Trump said that Harris’ proposal to tax unrealized capital gains would be catastrophic and would send the country into a depression.
“This woman is grossly incompetent,” he said.
He said that the Biden-Harris administration has imported millions of illegal aliens who are lowering wages and taking American jobs.
“So, as we create millions of new manufacturing jobs here in Georgia and nationwide, we will make sure these jobs go to American citizens, not illegal aliens,” Trump said.
Heritage Foundation economic policy expert E.J. Antoni wrote in June that while unemployment has been falling in recent years, most of the job growth has been among foreign-born workers.
“Over the last year, employment rose 637,000 for foreign-born workers, but fell 299,000 for native-born Americans,” Antoni wrote. “There are fewer native-born Americans employed today than before the [COVID-19] pandemic; meaning, American workers have made no progress in over four years. In fact, they’ve fallen behind.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/24/trump-calls-new-american-industrialism-speech-economy/
***************************************************************UK: Are the Tories brave enough to be conservative?
The Conservative party is out of power – and that’s not easy if you’ve been in power for more than a decade. Even after a short spell in government there are certain aspects of life that you miss. The drivers and others who used to manage your life and get you around. The legions of advisers. The security detail (if you held one of the high offices of state). And the civil servants who do your bidding.
That last one is a joke, of course. I know most readers will, like me, have found it difficult to listen to Conservative ministers complaining about civil servants during their 14 years in power. There might well have been cause to moan that civil servants were all a bunch of lazy lefties for the first couple of years. But after four election victories – or three and a half depending on how you count them – complaints that the bureaucrats are thwarting your wishes come to seem like an excuse. Surely 14 years is time enough to hire new bureaucrats?
Whoever wins the leadership race will discover they have two things they can wield: words and ideas
Then you get a reminder that riding the bureaucracy put in by a previous Labour administration did have consequences. In July, an anonymous civil servant wrote a piece in the Guardian in which they said that the general mood in the civil service after Keir Starmer’s election victory was ‘a profound sense of relief’. The then incoming Chief Secretary to the Treasury had ‘purred’ that ‘the adults are back in the room’. Another long-serving official said: ‘I’ve never been so glad to see the back of a government – of any colour.’ So it is fair to say the Tories certainly had their challenges in trying to steer that ship, not only against the tides but against the will of much of the crew.
Today the Conservatives don’t even have that power. They have nothing to hand. But, as I was reminded recently when reading a couple of books about Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, that does not mean they are completely without arms. Whoever wins the Conservative leadership race will discover that they have two things they can wield: words and ideas. And these two things are not nothing.
When Reagan was out of power in the 1970s, these were all he had, but gosh did he wield them well. Spurred on by his friendship with Buckley and other conservative thinkers, he realised that he had the opportunity to lay out a different vision from that of his Democrat opponents. That vision was not just about nipping around the edges of Democrat policies, but about laying out a separate idea of what America was and what it could be.
Reagan’s vision was one that most conservatives have been able to rattle off for the past five decades: a smaller state, fiscal responsibility, strong defence. Today’s conservatives sometimes do a copy of this. Or a copy of a copy. They talk about free markets, but it’s not always clear that they know what to do to let them flourish. I know it’s not good form to kick someone when they’re down, but it didn’t reassure me when, after leaving office, Liz Truss gave a video interview to this magazine in which she said that conservatives must make the case for free-market economics and, in listing the intellectual foundations for this, referred to the thinker ‘Hay-ak’. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue, but one got the impression that this was not a name that she had heard said out loud before.
Now, whoever becomes Conservative leader has a choice. They could shadow the Labour government, making comments about wardrobe allowances here, complaining about a national insurance hike there, or they could lay out a different future for the country. One in which, for instance, the state is not the answer to everything, but very often the problem. A country which doesn’t think that the only thing needed to improve public services is more investment. One in which if you do well, half of everything you earn doesn’t go to the government. They could also address the social divisions in Britain that everyone can see but that politicians find almost impossible to address.
The other week one of the Conservative leadership frontrunners, Kemi Badenoch, made reference to the highly sectarian group of MPs to the left of Labour who seem to want to introduce communitarian politics to the UK, specifically by raising issues which they believe will get them ‘the Muslim vote’ (to use the name that one Muslim campaigning group actually calls itself).
What Badenoch said was entirely fair. But one of her supporters was cast in the unenviable position of being her surrogate on talk shows that week and he was asked about her comments. It was an opportunity to give a robust push-back to the expectations of this country’s boring gotcha television interviewers, but you could hear the poor man flailing. Perhaps because he had the disadvantage of being male and white, this was terrain he was especially unhappy on. You could actually hear the man’s mouth dry up as the interview went on.
And yet the Conservative party cannot have truths about the nature of our country policed by the Beth Rigbys of the world, wherever they think the Overton Window of politics should be. If the Conservatives are going to stand any chance of getting back into government they will have to be able to say things that are true – even if they are unpopular with journalists at Sky News.
To do that they will need not just a small degree of bravery but a considerable amount of intellectual and moral grounding. Fortunately they have it, here and elsewhere. I am reminded of what Buckley said at the fifth anniversary dinner for his magazine, National Review: ‘We are probably destined to live out our lives in something less than a totally harmonious relationship with our times.’ Nevertheless, he added that conservatives could take comfort in knowing ‘that for so long as it is mechanically possible, you have a journal, a continuing witness to those truths which animated the birth of our country, and continue to animate our lives’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/are-the-tories-brave-enough-to-be-conservative/
***************************************September 24, 2024
Say what you want, Bibi and Trump have been vindicated on Mid-East policy
The tragic conflict unfolding in southern Lebanon holds the strangest geostrategic lesson: that the two most reviled democratic leaders in politics today, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, actually understand the Middle East better than most foreign policy professionals. This includes, sad to say, the fatuous posturings of our own government.
Israel’s broad strategic aim against Hezbollah in Lebanon is to remove the constant threat to northern Israeli communities. Rocket attacks are one thing, but after October 7 these communities can’t tolerate the danger of cross-border terror incursions
More than 60,000 Israeli residents have been internally displaced now for nearly a year. This moves Israel’s effective border kilometres inside its nominal border. The October 7 terrorist atrocities have had a similar effect on Israeli communities near Gaza.
Israel is one of the smallest countries in the world, smaller than the equivalent of one-third of Tasmania. On every land border it faces enemies or recent enemies. It has been subject to repeated conventional military attack by massed armies, and every possible form of terrorism.
Hezbollah is a Shi’ite terrorist organisation, unlike Hamas, which is Sunni. Both are funded by Iran’s Shi’ite regime. All three are united by a profound anti-Semitism, by an explicit determination to exterminate Israel and by a religious commitment to an Islamist political order.
Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have escalated, with Israel launching its most intense bombardment in southern Lebanon following Hezbollah's rocket attacks. President Isaac Herzog denied claims that Israel targeted Hezbollah's communication…
Israel’s strike through exploding message pagers against Hezbollah terrorists was the most precisely targeted military action in modern warfare. Everyone with a pager was a Hezbollah operative. Hezbollah, like Hamas, is proscribed as a terrorist organisation under Australian law.
Yet the Albanese government criticised Israel’s actions. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since October 7 and has long planned October 7-style murderous raids. The Albanese government claims Israel has a right to defend itself but condemns every single act of self-defence Israel takes or could possibly take.
This exemplifies the undergraduate hollowness of everything the government says on this issue. The Albanese government is neither good enough to be good, nor bad enough to be really bad. It lacks the courage of its convictions, it also lacks the courage of its lack of convictions. Abstaining on a plainly offensive UN resolution, which contradicts Australian policy in many ways, rather than just opposing it, illustrates the wretched, dismaying, morally bankrupt nature of Canberra’s approach.
There is no reason for any hostility between Israel and Lebanon. Both are wondrous cradles of civilisation. Australia is the beneficiary of magnificent Lebanese migration over many years. If Hezbollah didn’t constantly attack Israel, there would be no military conflict between them. Hezbollah’s hatred of Israel is ideological, religious, ethnic and tribal. It has caused immense suffering to the Lebanese people.
Yet while Israel is right to reclaim security for its northern towns and villages, the most it can hope for out of these actions is temporary tactical accommodation. Ordinary Lebanese hate the drama and misery that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel inevitably bring to Lebanon when Israel retaliates.
Israel’s calculation is not only to degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities but cause enough reaction within Lebanon itself that, for a time at least, Hezbollah returns to an uneasy truce. Israel will want Hezbollah personnel to stay some kilometres away from its border. Israeli towns can live with the danger of rocket attacks. The Israeli Iron Dome intercepts most of them and Israeli civilians are well drilled about air raid shelters.
But they can’t live with the spectre of October 7-style atrocities at a moment’s notice.
So how does this relate to my initial contention that Trump and Netanyahu were historically right and conventional wisdom historically wrong?
Netanyahu once told me in an interview, as he explained to others countless times, that his long-term aim for peace with the Palestinians was “outside in”. That is, that Israel would make peace with its neighbours first. This would lead to a long period of normalisation and eventually, in such an atmosphere, peace with the Palestinians would be possible.
This contradicted every theological dogma of conventional international relations, slavishly held by all Democrat politicians and officials in Washington, and which was of course the wholly derivate Labor Party view here, that the Palestinian issue had to be settled before there could be any broader peace.
Trump, through the Abraham Accords – peace treaties Israel signed with several of its Arab and North African neighbours – gave life to Netanyahu’s dream.
Here’s a key historical point. All up, including the initial partition of the land in 1947, Israel has offered Palestinians their own state four times on the most generous terms imaginable. Don’t take my word for it. Read the memoirs of Bill Clinton and his senior officials.
On each occasion the Palestinian leadership has rejected peace, either because of a hatred of Israel or a rational fear that whichever Palestinian leader makes peace will be assassinated. Until 10 minutes ago, the vast majority of Israeli society supported a two-state solution with an independent Palestinian state. But such an outcome involves enormous risk for Israel, with its tiny territory, and must include binding, credible security guarantees that the Palestinian state won’t be the launching ground for attacks on Israel.
Yet we know that Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and a number of other key actors are dedicated, in their core ideology, to destroying Israel. This history, and this reality, have turned Israelis against any near-term two-state solution.
Therefore, the best hope is to try to “normalise” life as much as possible, including Palestinian life, and revisit sovereignty negotiations down the track. I once had a long discussion with one of Israel’s most hardline politicians who had come to support Palestinian self-government under Israeli control as the best chance of achieving normalisation.
If you got 10 years of normalisation, I asked, would you then support Palestinian sovereignty? Show me the normalisation first, he replied. But with normalisation and a reasonable expectation of peace, Israelis would return to supporting a two-state solution. Before the October 7 attacks Netanyahu allowed billions of dollars of Arab aid into Gaza and also allowed thousands of Gazans to work in Israel for decent wages.
Hamas rendered all that impossible by its barbaric attacks. Tony Blair didn’t resolve the conflicting national and sovereign ambitions in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday peace agreement. He produced instead an arrangement of normalisation, in which sectarian violence became deeply abnormal, as it always should have been.
In retrospect the worst Israeli intelligence failure was not to see that the prospect of an Israel-Saudi Arabia peace deal would lead Iran and its proxies, whether Hamas or Hezbollah, to take extreme action to derail it. The October 7 attack succeeded in that derailment.
It’s impossible to say anything more unfashionable than the next sentence, which is nonetheless true: when the dust settles, it will be the Netanyahu/Trump approach that offers the best chance of peace. But that’s a long way off now.
*********************************************************
Biden’s diplomatic magical thinking
As tensions escalate and bombs fall across the Middle East, President Biden’s emissaries continue to urge all parties to calm down and dial back the violence.
No one is listening, and this brings us to the central paradox of a troubled presidency stumbling toward an inglorious close. Mr Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back.
No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success?
Mr Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.
For nearly a year Team Biden has given its all to the diplomatic effort to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Repeatedly, administration officials have hailed progress toward an agreement that would pause the fighting and send the Israeli hostages home. But senior officials are conceding privately that the chances of a ceasefire deal during Mr. Biden’s remaining months in office are slim.
For the past few weeks Washington has been frantically trying to prevent the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah from escalating dramatically. Like Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Hamas and the Houthis, neither Israel nor Hezbollah thinks Washington is dispensing sound policy advice.
The Biden administration wants something it can’t have in the Middle East: continued influence with diminished presence.
Its diplomacy is aimed at preserving a regional order that depends on the kind of American power projection the president desperately wants to avoid.
The metastasising conflicts across the Middle East that Mr. Biden hates are the natural and inevitable consequence of his own policies.
As America withdraws, or attempts to withdraw, from the region, its influence over the relevant parties diminishes. The less reliable America looks, the less value anyone attaches to promises of American support. The more obviously America looks toward the exits, the less anyone fears American power.
As Iran’s fear of American power fades, it becomes more aggressive. As Gulf Arabs’ confidence in American wisdom and commitment shrinks, they hesitate between their desire to oppose Iran and the need to conciliate the rising power of a dangerous neighbour. This in turn drives Israel to ever tougher and more dramatic responses as it scrambles to convince both Iran and the Arab countries that it can deter Iranian aggression even as America walks away.
Mr Biden has fundamentally misjudged what diplomacy is and what it can and can’t do.
As a man who came of age politically during the Vietnam War and was politically and personally scarred by his support for the Iraq war, the president knows in his bones that military power projection unrelated to an achievable political goal often leads to expensive disasters.
He isn’t wrong about this, but like many in the Democratic policy world, Mr. Biden rejected a misguided overconfidence in military force only to attribute similar magic powers to diplomacy. Diplomacy in quest of an unachievable political goal is as misguided as poorly conceived military adventurism and can ultimately be as costly.
In the 1930s, the U.S. thought Japan’s attempt to conquer China was both immoral and bad for American interests, but a mix of naive pacifism and blind isolationism blocked any serious response. Instead, Washington settled on a diplomatic stance of nonresistance to Japanese aggression mixed with nonrecognition of Japanese conquests and claims. The policy failed to help China.
What it accomplished was to persuade a critical mass of Japanese leaders that America was irredeemably decadent. They gradually came to believe that a nation so foolishly led would respond to the destruction of its Pacific fleet with diplomats rather than aircraft carriers.
Mr Biden’s diplomats must struggle against the near-universal global perception that the administration’s Middle East policy is similarly blind. Allies as well as adversaries increasingly disregard American wishes and discount its warnings.
That isn’t good for American interests, and it won’t bring peace to the region. As events slide out of control, Mr. Biden’s diplomats can do little more than wring their hands and wish for better times. The failure isn’t their fault. Like soldiers sent into a war their leaders don’t know how to win, America’s diplomats were tasked with an impossible mission their leader never thought through.
***************************************
September 23, 2024
Biden Claimed For Months That Gaza Ceasefire Was In Sight — Now His Own Officials Reportedly Think It’s A Pipe Dream
Even after multiple assurances from President Joe Biden over recent weeks and months that an Israel-Hamas ceasefire could be right around the corner, U.S. officials are reportedly privately starting to concede that he won’t be able to help secure a deal before his term ends.
Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 sparked a broader regional war and sent an already chaotic Middle East further into turmoil, prompting the Biden-Harris administration to try to pursue diplomatic solutions to end the conflict and reduce tensions between Arab states. Biden has routinely touted his efforts to secure a ceasefire agreement and hinted on several occasions that a deal was close at hand, but these efforts have largely been fruitless — and now U.S. officials are beginning to believe that it may be impossible to secure anything before Biden leaves office, given the roadblocks that remain between Israel and Hamas, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. (RELATED: Israel Keeps Foot On Pedal, Reportedly Goes After Terrorist Wanted By US For Bombing Marine Barracks In 1983)
“No deal is imminent,” one of the U.S. officials told the WSJ. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”
The private concerns that a deal is out of reach aren’t fully reflected in public statements recently made by Biden officials, who have maintained that an agreement is still on the table while expressing frustration with Hamas’ obstinance in negotiations. A senior administration official told reporters in early September that “90 percent” of the deal had been agreed to between Israel and Hamas, which White House spokesman John Kirby reaffirmed during a press briefing on Wednesday.
But former State Department official Gabriel Noronha told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it’s often the remaining, narrower aspects of such a deal that are the hardest to resolve.
“Generally, you take care of the easier-to-agree items first, and the last items are the ones that are the hardest,” Noronha told the DCNF, pointing to disputes over whether Israel should keep some troops in Gaza as one of the sticking points of a deal. “Those are the tough items.”
In recent weeks and months, Biden has seemed more positive about reaching a ceasefire agreement. Biden told reporters at the end of August that he was “optimistic” a deal could soon be reached because most of the terms had been agreed to and that talks were continuing between Arab partners.
Biden said weeks earlier that he “may have something” on a deal but didn’t want to “jinx it,” claiming that his team was “closer than we’ve ever been” to securing an agreement.
“It’s much, much closer than it was three days ago. So, keep your fingers crossed,” Biden told reporters on Aug. 16.
Biden had been adamant for months that a ceasefire was needed urgently, putting forward his own proposal for a deal in May, which has yet to be accepted, and before that warning that a deal had to be reached by March, which never happened. Even as early as February, Biden was predicting that a ceasefire could be reached within days.
“Well, I hope by the beginning of the weekend — I mean the end of the weekend [that a deal will be reached],” Biden told reporters in February.
In the last couple of months, U.S. officials have become increasingly pessimistic that a deal could be reached, largely due to Hamas, which has been stubborn in negotiations and set unrealistic terms for an agreement. Hamas has frequently set new demands for proposals — and after the U.S. and Israel agree to the terms, the terrorist group still rejects offers, according to the WSJ.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with the families of the remaining American hostages in Gaza on Wednesday, relaying the current status of negotiations and reaffirming that Biden won’t stop until their relatives are brought home, according to Hostage Aid Worldwide. But the families “expressed frustration with the lack of tangible progress and stressed that everyone needs to play a larger role in reaching an agreement.”
Adding to the complications are Israel’s tensions with Iran, and its terror proxy group, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both Hezbollah and Iran have engaged in either direct or indirect skirmishes with Israel since the war broke out last October. Israel is suspected of carrying out a highly-targeted, remote attacks against Hezbollah in recent days, prompting warnings of retaliation from the terrorist group, which is already engaged in cross-fire skirmishes with Israel over the Israeli-Lebanese border.
“There’s no chance now of [a deal] happening,” an Arab official told the WSJ following the attacks in Lebanon this week. “Everyone is in a wait-and-see mode until after the election. The outcome will determine what can happen in the next administration.”
With the convoluted rift between Israel and Hamas over a deal and the compounding factors emanating from Hezbollah and Iran, the Biden-Harris administration has too little control over negotiations at this stage in the game, and it’s unlikely that any deal will be reached between now and the end of Biden’s term, Noronha told the DCNF.
“They’re probably not going to get one before the election, or before January either. But that’s not on them, per se. It speaks to the difficulty of how far apart [Israel and Hamas] are,” Noronha said.
Still, securing a ceasefire agreement in Gaza would represent a notable success for Biden’s foreign policy approach and potentially unlock the possibility of broader regional peace. A deal could pave the way for talks to open up between Israel and Saudi Arabia over establishing formal diplomatic ties, although Saudi Arabia has said such relations aren’t possible until Israel agrees to a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
For the time being, the U.S. is continuing to help broker negotiations between Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas negotiators, with a specific focus on how to overcome the hurdles currently barring a deal from being reached — if it is even possible at this juncture.
“We have run into some resistance,” Kirby told reporters Wednesday. “And we’re just not … any closer today than we were a few days ago.”
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‘Real Ground To Make Up’: ABC Political Director Warns ‘Kamala Harris Has Issues’ With Hispanic Voters
Vice President Kamala Harris is struggling compared to past Democratic candidates among Hispanic voters, which could cost her key states in November, ABC News Political Director Rick Klein said Sunday.
Harris led former President Donald Trump by 17% among likely Hispanic voters in an ABC News poll released September 15. Klein said that the vice president’s margin meant Trump could win Arizona and Nevada.
“Right now, our latest polling shows a solid lead among Latino voters for Kamala Harris, 17 points in our latest ABC-Ipsos poll from just a couple of days ago, but that isn’t nearly the edge she has among black voters or Asian voters and it isn’t nearly the edge that previous Democratic candidates for president have had — 30-plus point advantage for Joe Biden in the exit polls among Latino voters from four years ago,” Klein told “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos.
“Hillary Clinton won Latino voters by 40 points and, of course, she still lost the presidency, so there’s some real ground to make up across demographics, but particularly with Latino voters. Kamala Harris has issues that she’s got to attend to,” Klein added.
Trump picked up substantial support among Hispanic voters in polling before President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection July 21, due in part to issues like immigration and the economy. Harris has regained some support from Hispanic voters since replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
The U.S. Border Patrol encountered nearly 7.4 million illegal immigrants since the start of fiscal year 2021, according to figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Trump trails Harris by 2.2% in the RealClearPolling average of polls from September 3 to 18, with the vice president’s lead increasing to an average of 2.6% when Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, independent candidate Cornel West and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver are included in surveys.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/22/abc-kamala-harris-issues-hispanic-voters/
****************************************************‘That’s Enormous’: Steve Kornacki Describes Massive ‘Gender Gap’ Between Trump, Harris In New Poll
NBC National Political Reporter Steve Kornacki said during a “Meet the Press” appearance that Vice President Kamala Harris is benefiting from a significant “gender gap” among voters in a new poll.
Harris leads former President Donald Trump, 49% to 44% in a new NBC poll released Sunday, with her lead expanding to six points when third-party candidates are included. Kornacki noted that the lead was powered by Harris leading Trump among women, which “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker said “completely reshaped” the campaign after Biden announced he would not seek reelection July 21
“One of the things powering that lead, we should note, too there is a pretty pronounced gender gap. Harris, among women, is leading in our poll by 21 polls,” Kornacki told Welker. “Among men, Trump is leading by 12. That is a 33-point gender gap. That’s enormous what we’re seeing right here.”
“Take a look at this, too, the debate, of course, happening in the last couple of weeks,” Kornacki continued, referencing the Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News hosts David Muir and Linsey Davis. “Nearly 30% said that debate made them more likely to support Harris, much smaller number for Trump, that might be helping her as well here, and then there’s this: the view, the overall perception of Kamala Harris. Remember, before she got in the race there was a lot of talk that her numbers didn’t look better than Biden’s. She was 32 positive, 50 negative before getting in this race and now this is what you see.”
Harris currently leads Trump by 1.9% in the RealClearPolling average of polls from September 3 to 18, with her lead increasing to 2.1% when Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, independent candidate Cornel West and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver are included in surveys. The averages did not include the NBC poll as of Sunday morning. (RELATED: MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki Claims Harris Provides ‘More Paths For Democrats’ To Win)
“We have to pause here, because this is the largest increase that we’ve seen for any politician since George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11th attacks on this issue,” Welker gushed after Kornacki showed a graphic showing 48% of respondents to the NBC poll viewed Harris favorably compared to 45% who viewed her unfavorably.
The NBC poll of 1,000 registered voters was conducted Sept. 13-17, with a 3.1% margin of error.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/22/steve-kornacki-gender-gap-voters-trump-harris-poll/
*************************************************September 22, 2024
The science of voting for Kamala Harris
Toby Young
The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. She is the candidate that anyone who cares about science should vote for, apparently. Her positions on issues such as ‘the climate crisis’, ‘public health’ and ‘reproductive rights’ are ‘lit by rationality’ and based on ‘reality’, ‘science’ and ‘solid evidence’, while her opponent ‘rejects evidence’ in favour of ‘nonsensical conspiracy fantasies’.
There’s something a bit odd about a science magazine getting embroiled in the grubby world of politics
On the face of it, there’s something a bit odd about a storied science magazine getting embroiled in the grubby world of politics. Indeed, the editorial acknowledges how unusual this is, suggesting that’s all the more reason we should take the recommendation seriously. The editors have descended from Mount Olympus because the fate of America – nay, the world – is at stake: ‘That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president.’ True, the previous occasion was only four years ago when it endorsed Joe Biden, but the editors have a point. It is rather unorthodox.
So how can science tell us how to vote? My admittedly primitive understanding of the history of science is that it only really began to transform our understanding of the world when a firm distinction emerged between fact and value – between descriptive propositions, which depict the world as it is, and prescriptive ones, which tell us how it ought to be. That is, the Scientific Revolution occurred when students of nature eschewed politics and religion and embraced reason and empiricism. In that context, the editors of Scientific American, in seeking to muddy those waters again, seem to want to return to an era in which the evidence of our senses – ‘reality’, as they put it – tells us how to behave. In defiance of the naturalistic fallacy, they are smashing the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ back together.
This seems a little unwise, to put it mildly. If believing in ‘the science’ means you have to vote Democrat, how are you going to persuade Republicans to embrace your ‘evidence-based’ policy on, say, Roe vs Wade? A paper in Nature Human Behaviour last year found that the endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 by Nature, the prestigious science journal, caused Trump supporters to distrust the publication, lowered the demand for Covid-related information it published (i.e. downloads of articles on the efficacy of the Covid vaccines fell substantially) and reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. I can’t quite get my head around just how stupid this is. It’s a bit like a group of evangelical Christians telling potential converts that if they vote Democrat they’ll go straight to hell. If you’re in the proselytising business, as Scientific American clearly is, it seems a bit daft to alienate roughly half the US population.
There’s also the fact that, in the event of Trump winning, he’ll be more likely to cut federal spending on scientific research and public health. In fact, this is one of the reasons given by Scientific American to vote for Kamala, but talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! After all, why would Trump give billions of dollars to a community that’s aligned itself with his opponent? Wouldn’t it be more prudent for these panjandrums of the scientific establishment to remain above the political fray?
One explanation of why the editors of these high-profile science publications are behaving in such a bizarre way is that they’re just partisan hacks, determined to persuade people to vote Democrat. According to this theory, they don’t really believe science has anything meaningful to say about who to vote for – how could it? They’re just pretending it does to gull their less sophisticated readers into supporting Kamala.
But I don’t buy that. More likely, I fear, is that the editors of Scientific American really do believe in the snake oil they’re selling. It’s not science they’re committed to, but scientism – a weird hybrid of technocratic managerialism and radical progressive ideology. If the modern era was made possible by the separation of knowledge and morality, the worshippers at this new altar seem determined to usher in a new post-modern utopia in which science and religion are fused once again. In that light, they cannot help but endorse Harris because their consciences won’t allow them to do otherwise. It’s not a choice dictated by science, but by theology. Trump, who gleefully trespasses over their sacred values, is the devil and they must stop him. The title of their magazine should be changed to Scientistic Americans.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-science-of-voting-for-kamala-harris/
*********************************************************The Harris Campaign Is Pure Run-Out-the-Clock Cynicism
Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris—ever since President Joe Biden, at the 11th hour, dropped out in July.
Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked.
Her single, 11-minute postdebate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating—even though the host was sympathetically left-wing.
Even socialist Bernie Sanders pointed out that for Harris to get elected, she must temporarily disown her lifelong leftist credentials.
As vice president, she must further deny co-ownership of the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration.
Left unstated is that whether she wins the presidency—or loses it and continues as vice president for another three months—nonetheless she will inevitably revert back to her hard-core, lifelong leftist beliefs.
In addition, Harris has reconstructed her privileged upbringing as a child of two PhDs, living in a posh Montreal neighborhood into a struggling, middle-class Oakland childhood.
How can she stage such a complete makeover—and contemptuously count on the voting public to be so easily deceived?
She avoids all news conferences, one-on-one nationally broadcast interviews, and town halls. And like Biden, she will debate only on leftist venues with impartial pro-Harris moderators.
When asked to provide the details of her past responsibility for the open border, inflationary economy, spiraling crime, attacks on fossil fuels, and collapsing foreign policy, Harris smiles, makes hand gestures, and dodges. She changes the subject to her empathetic personality, her “joy” campaign, and her iconic profile as a supposedly dynamic black woman.
When pressed, Harris outsources the task of squaring her hypocrisies and subterfuges to the stonewalling campaign, Democratic surrogates—and the media.
Harris is also certainly not running on her demonstrable experience, vision, or intelligence as much as she is not Donald Trump (or, for that matter, her former partner, Biden).
To make that distinction stark, Harris must demonize and bait Trump nonstop and make the country fear him.
So, she paints Trump as a racist and violent insurrectionist, not a former president whose four-year term saw a superior foreign policy, economy, border, and security than during the Biden-Harris term.
Instead, Harris has repeatedly claimed Trump is a dictator and a threat to democracy—as if he had politically weaponized the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, or IRS as had former President Barack Obama and Biden.
Trump as Hitler has become a staple Democrat smear for the past decade.
That vicious caricature is so entrenched that major Democratic figures assume it’s OK to joke about, or seriously call for, Trump’s demise.
So, Harris’ current prominent adviser David Plouffe years ago warned the nation that “it is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”
Just last year, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., claimed that Trump “is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be, he has to be eliminated.”
Even after an assassin sought to kill Trump last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025. We must stop them.”
Harris’ dehumanizing of Trump, outsourcing the campaign to the media, avoiding all public dialogue, and temporarily reinventing one’s politics and biography have taken a toll on the country.
Harris was coronated the Democratic candidate without ever entering a primary or winning a single delegate by vote. Some 14 million Democrat primary voters were reduced to irrelevancy.
Like the 2020 Biden campaign, Harris has nationalized a new kind of cynical campaign in which leftist candidates seek for a few months to deceive the public into thinking they are centrist and moderate—until elected.
Avoiding all cross-examination and outsourcing the campaign to the obsequious media is now the new norm.
Most news stories deemed unhelpful to Harris—the left-wing, pro-Harris politics of the recent would-be Trump assassin, the distortion that dozens of bomb threats were called in against Springfield schools by Trump supporters when most, if not all, were perpetrated by foreign actors, or prominent Democrats before and after the recent assassination attempt blaming Trump for being the target of an assassin—are suppressed by the media.
The recent two foiled assassination attempts on Trump logically follow a near-decade pattern of trying to destroy rather than outvote him.
The Russian collusion hoax, the laptop disinformation con, the two impeachments, the effort to remove Trump from some 16 state ballots, and the attempt to jail and bankrupt Trump through five criminal and civil “lawfare” indictments and suits also led to the current hateful climate of Trump assassination attempts.
Harris thinks her delays, deceptions, and vilifications for the next 47 days will ensure her victory.
But if so, it will be because she, her stealth campaign, and her self-proclaimed guardians of democracy have been willing to systematically destroy it.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/20/can-harriss-cynical-run-out-the-clock-campaign-succeed/
*************************************************September 19, 2024
Taylor Swift’s Endorsement of Harris Has Had Minimal Effect, Poll Finds
The night of the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, pop star Taylor Swift decided to use her platform to endorse the Democratic nominee. But as some have pointed out, it did not seem to have the impact the Left thought it would.
The singer, widely known for her catchy tunes about breakups and poor life decisions, wrote, “Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most.”
As part of the multi-paragraph post, Swift officially announced, “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election”—a decision she said she made in light of Harris being a “steady-handed, gifted leader” and Walz “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.”
And yet, as a recent YouGov poll revealed, that did not appear to sway the minds and hearts of very many. In fact, Swift encouraged her Instagram followers to do their own research and make their own choices, and it seems they are doing just that—independent of Swift’s opinion, for that matter.
According to the survey, which polled 1,120 potential voters Sept. 11-12, 66% of the respondents felt Swift’s public endorsement made no difference in how they would vote. Eight percent—made up of females registered as Democrats—said it made them “somewhat” or “much more likely” to vote for Harris. But notably, 20% said Swift’s post made them “somewhat” or “much less likely” to cast a vote for the Democrat.
Additionally, a plurality of those polled, 41%, said Swift should “not speak publicly about politics,” as opposed to the 38% who said she should, and 21% who were unsure. Very few felt Swift’s endorsement would have a negative effect on the Harris campaign, while the majority, 32%, believed it would have a positive impact. And this was true despite the fact that 66% of those surveyed did not consider themselves fans of the singer.
A similar story unfolded in 2018 when Swift decided to endorse Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s, R-Tenn., opponent, Phil Bredesen, the former governor of Tennessee. The performer reportedly had been “reluctant” to engage in the political arena earlier in her career, but noted that at the time, “due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now.” However, similar to her recent endorsement, it had very little impact, with only 11.7% of surveyed voters saying it “made them more likely to vote for Bredesen.” Blackburn ended up winning that Tennessee election, 54.7% to 43.9%.
Experts at that time noted that “celebrities don’t really have these huge overall game-changing effects” in terms of elections, and “we shouldn’t expect them to.” But that hasn’t stopped Americans from speaking their minds.
Outside of the YouGov survey and inside the world of social media, one user posted, “If you’re old enough to vote, a celebrity endorsement shouldn’t have any effect. Voters need to look at issues not multimillionaires with no world experiences.”
In some cases, moms have posted videos about selling their Taylor Swift concert tickets originally intended for their daughters. And several others have hopped on the “I hate Taylor Swift” trend on X, in which users have been sharing their grievances with both the singer’s announcement and her music at large—a movement being countered by the “I love Taylor Swift” crowd.
The Family Research Council’s Joseph Backholm shared with The Washington Stand not merely what Swift’s endorsement or the resulting poll data means, but what Christians specifically can take away from current events. First, he stated, “Celebrities have the same right to speak their mind as everyone else.” And given America’s First Amendment rights, “no one should feel like they aren’t free to say what they think.”
And while there’s “a lot of evidence [celebrities] don’t make a meaningful difference” in elections, “it’s the most natural thing in the world to be influenced by the people around us,” he pointed out, and it’s “probably unavoidable.” It’s not our responsibility to stop celebrities from sharing their opinions, Backholm said, but “the trick is being aware of who is influencing us and the direction they’re pulling us in.”
For believers, Backholm emphasized, “A key to the Christian life is knowing what voices we should listen to and what voices we [should] ignore,” because “the fact that there will be voices is just a reality of life.” As humans, “We tend to listen to the people we admire or want to be admired by,” which means “we have to make sure the people we esteem are worthy of it in a biblical sense.”
“In voting,” he continued, “as in every decision in life, we should be most interested in God’s opinion” above all else. Because even though “He doesn’t formally make endorsements, He has given us instructions about how to evaluate leadership and the kinds of character traits we should value.” Ultimately, “Scripture also helps us understand what choices will bring blessing, security, and prosperity and what kind of choices will lead to pain.”
“Unless we are more concerned with God’s opinion than the opinion of a celebrity or our social circle,” Backholm concluded, “we will be easily deceived and manipulated.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/17/taylor-swift-support-harris-minimal-impact-poll-finds/
************************************************Trump Is Ultimately Responsible for Assassination Attempts Against Him, Traitor Vindman Says
Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel of Ukrainian descent whose testimony led the House of Representatives to impeach President Donald Trump in 2019, blamed Trump after a second gunman reportedly attempted to assassinate the former president on Sunday.
Vindman’s brother, Yevgeny who goes by Eugene, is running for Congress as a Democrat in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and his Republican opponent has called on Eugene Vindman to condemn his brother’s statement as a matter of character.
“Only one presidential candidate, [Donald Trump] has called for persecution and violence against his opponents,” Vindman posted on X. “Trump has provided the permission for political violence and likely engendered from the mentally ill, the attacks on himself.”
Eugene Vindman condemned the assassination attempt, but appears not to have condemned his brother’s rhetoric.
“I am deeply disturbed by yet another attempt of political violence in our nation,” the candidate posted on X. “I am grateful that no one is hurt, and thankful for the law enforcement agents who acted bravely and swiftly in the line of duty.”
Alexander Vindman’s wife, Rachel, published three posts after the shooting, before deleting them and apologizing on Monday. “No ears were harmed,” she posted, referencing the first assassination attempt, in which a bullet grazed Trump’s right ear. “Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.”
She added a post with laugh emojis stating, “Sorry you’re triggered. I mean no I’m not. I don’t care a little bit.”
“Trump has been inciting violence against his enemies for years,” she added in a third post. “He douses a situation in gasoline, lights a match, & walks away claiming no responsibility.”
Derrick Anderson, Eugene Vindman’s Republican opponent, faulted the Democrat for failing to condemn “the horrible statements by his family members and political advisors.”
“In fact, the Vindman family has actually doubled and tripled down on their hateful rhetoric and are now justifying the second failed assassination attempt on Trump,” Anderson said. “A dangerous precedent.”
Anderson is running in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, a swing district that could go Republican or Democrat in November. Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the incumbent, declined to run for reelection, announcing that she would run for governor in 2025 instead.
“While my opponent is failing the leadership and decency test as we speak, I will always stand up to do what is right for [Virginia’s 7th Congressional District], my home, the place that raised me,” Anderson added. “The American people must be our priority over partisan politics right now.”
After The Daily Signal reached out to Eugene Vindman and Alexander Vindman for comment, Rachel Vindman deleted her posts and issued an apology.
“I have deleted my tweet,” she wrote. “It was flippant & political violence is a serious issue. Whether it’s aimed at a former president, the media, immigrants, or political ‘enemies’ & every incident should be addressed appropriately if we want to change the tenor of our political discourse.”
She added that she has “known the instant fear of receiving an unknown package or letter” and has had her child ask “if we were safe and if someone was going to hurt our family.”
**************************************************
12 Influencers Who Called for Violence Against Trump, Called Him an ‘Existential Threat to Democracy’
Ahead of the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, many influential actors, journalists, and influencers warned that Trump is an “existential threat” to democracy, compared him to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and suggested he or his supporters should face violent attacks. Some continued attacking Trump even after the first assassination attempt July 13.
The New Tolerance Campaign, a nonprofit watchdog aimed at confronting “intolerance double standards” practiced by “establishment institutions, civil rights groups, universities, and socially conscious brands,” compiled a list of extreme rhetoric against Trump that may have contributed to the second assassination attempt.
“New Tolerance Campaign research has shown two kinds of consistent and consistently charged rhetoric surrounding President Trump: insistence that his reelection would lead to the collapse of the country, and calls for the former president’s death,” Gregory T. Angelo, New Tolerance Campaign’s president, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Monday. (New Tolerance Campaign has taken to exposing extremism on the Left, to balance the impact of left-leaning groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.)
“These proclamations aren’t sarcastic; they’re literal, and they’re being spoken by high-profile politicians and members of the mainstream media with massive audiences,” Angelo added. “It’s shocking that there have been two attempts on President Trump’s life, but not surprising given the existential hyperbole about him pounding Americans’ ears day in and day out.”
Other Violent Threats to Trump
Both Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who authorities say shot Trump in the right ear July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, and Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, the man suspected of planning to assassinate the former president Sunday at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, got surprisingly close to the former president.
However, New Tolerance Campaign identified five others who faced charges for threatening to harm or kill Trump.
In January 2021, a judge sentenced 53-year-old Connecticut resident Gary Joseph Gravelle to nine years in prison after his conviction for sending a letter threatening to kill Trump in September 2018.
In January 2022, police arrested and charged New York City resident Thomas Welnicki, 72, with calling the Secret Service and threatening to kill Trump. He proclaimed that he intended to “stand up to fascism” by assassinating the former president.
In August, police arrested Arizona resident Ronald Lee Syvrud, 66, and charged him with threatening Trump’s life during the former president’s campaign trip to the Copper State.
In July, police arrested and charged Florida resident Michael M. Wiseman, 68, with making written threats to kill Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, after the assassination attempt in Butler.
Last month, police arrested and charged Illinois resident Justin Lee White, 36, with repeatedly threatening Trump, police, and Republicans with violence if the former president didn’t “play fair” during the election campaign.
Where would Welnicki get the idea that standing up to “fascism” involves targeting Trump? The full list of left-leaning pundits, celebrities, and politicians who compared Trump to Hitler would be too long to compile. But New Tolerance Campaign highlighted many examples
*************************************************
September 18, 2024
Harris’ ‘Two-State Solution’ Would ‘Wipe Israel Off the Map’
It’s been almost a year since the Hamas terrorist organization attacked Israel on Oct. 7. The massacre left over 1,200 people dead and over 200 kidnapped—including women, men, and children. Since the attack, the Biden administration has made its support for a two-state solution clear. And now, with Vice President Kamala Harris running as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, it appears nothing has changed.
During Tuesday’s debate between the vice president and the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Harris restated her support for a cease-fire and two-state solution, which, as Family Research Council President Tony Perkins explained on Thursday’s episode of “Washington Watch,” would ultimately “transfer the geographical heart of the state of Israel, Judea and Samaria, to the Palestinians.”
Harris declared, “We must chart a course for a two-state solution, and in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel and an equal measure for the Palestinians.” But experts on the ground in Israel like Caroline Glick say that a two-state solution is not a viable option.
First, Glick emphasized on “Washington Watch” how Harris’ comments during Tuesday’s debate are likely to “lower her level of support” in Israel. As a senior contributing editor at the Jewish News Syndicate, Glick and her colleagues have been conducting polls “of Israeli sentiments regarding the presidential race.” As she stated, after their most recent update shortly before the presidential debate, “Trump was leading by more than two-thirds of Israelis supporting him over Kamala Harris.” She added, “I assume that next week when we poll that question,” the results will be similar.
Glick further noted that Harris made potentially “the most hostile statement ever made by a major presidential candidate, by a nominee of one of the major parties, regarding Israel in history. … Her hostility toward Israel was stunning.”
Glick explained how the attack on Oct. 7 was the “most sadistic” slaughter Israel has seen, and yet, Harris’ stance seems to reflect that she sees a cease-fire as a way to “pay the Palestinians.” And while it is true that many Palestinian civilians have died over this past year, Glick asserted that this was still “very much an invasion of Palestinian society into Israel, not just Hamas.”
According to Glick, some military estimates found that out of the 10,000 people that entered Israel from Gaza during the attack, 5,000 to 6,000 were Hamas members, and the rest were Palestinian civilians. And so, Perkins noted, when considering the fact that Harris wants a solution that’s in “equal measure for the Palestinians,” it becomes even clearer how the Biden-Harris administration’s “support of Israel has been tepid at best.” Moving forward, he asked, is it possible policies under a potential Harris-Walz administration would be “even more indifferent toward Israel or outright hostile?”
In response, Glick emphasized how, should Harris get elected, America could expect to see more hostility toward Israel. “I think that what Kamala Harris showed at the debate … is that an America under her presidency will not allow Israel to do anything beyond intercepting missiles en route to Israel” and will not allow the Jewish state to take “offensive actions against our enemies, whether it’s Iran or the Palestinians or Hezbollah.”
Glick pointed out how Harris said she “will always support Israel’s right to defend itself,” but that doesn’t change the fact that “the United States right now continues to embargo 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs to Israel, because they don’t want us to take offensive action that will effectively diminish the capacities of our enemies.”
Returning to the topic of the two-state solution, Perkins addressed how the land in question includes a “small strip of the Gaza Strip,” the home of the people attacking Israel. Considering this, he asked, how would Israel be able to defend itself if its land “is given away to a hostile entity?”
“It can’t,” Glick said somberly. “It manifestly cannot do so.” Which is “the problem,” she added, because “people talk about the two-state solution as if this is some sort of responsible policy, but it’s not.” Rather, it establishes “a Palestinian state, causing Israel to renounce our rights to our biblical homeland” and paves the way for “Israel to be defeated.”
Glick concluded, “[G]iving people whose goal in life is to annihilate the Jewish state and the Jewish people … sovereignty over the West Bank of the Jordan of Judea and Samaria” means “giving them the keys to the realm. You are telling them, ‘Go ahead, wipe Israel off the map.’
***************************************************
What doesn’t kill Trump makes him stronger
As if there hadn’t been enough drama in America in 2024, Donald Trump has survived another assassination attempt.
The attempted killing of the 45th president at his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida yesterday afternoon was not nearly as threatening as nine weeks ago in Butler, Pennsylvania. Secret Service, who have faced so much criticism for their failings in Butler, found the would-be killer’s weapon before he was able to target Trump, shots were fired, and the suspect appears to have been arrested fleeing the scene.
What took place in Florida will show voters that a lot of people want Trump dead
It’s still big news. Questions will rightly be asked as to how an armed man was again able to get so close to Trump. At a press conference yesterday, an official said that, had Trump been a sitting president, the entire course would have been secured in advance. Given the recency of the last attempt of Trump’s life, that seems an oversight. Trumpworld is already suggesting it is another conspiracy.
That may be more mad talk – yet the incident could still prove to be a major moment in the presidential campaign, chiefly because it brings to mind the ongoing threat to Trump’s life. And it will remind voters of his narrow escape in Pennsylvania and his extraordinary courage under fire.
After all the drama surrounding Kamala Harris’s elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump’s ‘fight fight fight!’ response that Saturday evening in July had somehow faded from the public consciousness.
Last week, in the debate in Pennsylvania, Trump said ‘he probably took a bullet to the head’ because of Biden and Harris’s inflammatory rhetoric against him. But the remark was largely ignored. Most commentary focused on his poor debate performance and Trump tirades about rallies and Haitians eating pets in Ohio.
Yet what took place in Florida yesterday will show voters that a lot of people want Trump dead. That will probably boost his appeal among people who don’t. Trump is an extraordinary political candidate, who thrives off enmity, and whatever doesn’t kill him makes him stronger. Sure enough, last night the betting markets improved in Trump’s favour.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/what-doesnt-kill-trump-makes-him-stronger/
**************************************************‘The Science’ Lights Their Last Bit Of Credibility On Fire For Kamala Harris
Scientific American, a supposedly prestigious science magazine founded in 1845, lit a fire to its last shred of credibility Monday by endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
The journal has only made presidential endorsements twice, the first time being in 2020 when the editorial board backed then-candidate Joe Biden, a very erudite and scientific man with the scholarly sensibilities of a Victorian gentleman. In an equally fawning and delusional endorsement, the editors at Scientific American practically salivate at the idea of a Kamala presidency.
“She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy,” they write of Harris. “She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.” (Click HERE to sign up for John’s weekly newsletter)
The editors also note that as president she would be “relying on science” (read, “left-wing orthodoxy”), “solid evidence” (read, “data and numbers cooked by hacks and government bureaucrats”), and a “willingness to learn from experience” (we’d hope so, but read, “complete lack of self-awareness”).
On Donald Trump, however, the editors argue that he “endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies.”
Trump “goads people into hate and division, and he inspires extremists at state and local levels to pass laws that disrupt education and make it harder to earn a living,” they write, breathlessly.
I’m not here to debunk every point the editors make in support of Harris, and I’m not here to argue why a Trump presidency would be good for science (who’s sitting in the Oval Office should really have no bearing on whether science flourishes in America). That would take far too long, and far too many Zyns, and I frankly don’t care.
I simply want to point out the utter absurdity that a journal of science, certainly one that seeks to maintain its authority and credibility in a social media world where former credible authorities have been all but destroyed, would ever want to jump into politics in such a crude, pedestrian manner for such an unimpressive and unintelligent candidate.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus, Washington, DC, June 3, 2024. Fauci was to many, the public face of government response to the coronavirus and a frequent target of Republican lawmakers’ ire arising from the shutdown.
Aside from virtue signaling and making themselves feel morally superior, what is the upside of Scientific American endorsing a political candidate? No voter cares about what they have to say about politics, and no swing voter in Pennsylvania or North Carolina will read their litany of propaganda and say to themselves, “Well, sheeit, that’s the one. Harris for president.” They are only harming themselves, and for a magazine that was recently dunked on by a former columnist for being too left-wing, this is not the move. (RELATED: Former Columnist Exposes Scientific American’s Sudden Descent Into Left-Wing Ideology)
For a long time, it seems, ‘The Science’ has been turning into a refuge for careerists and hacks, ideologues and do-gooders, bureaucrats such as Tony Fauci or C-list actors such as Bill Nye, all of whom have the combined mental acuity of a braindead cow. Maybe this has always been the case, throughout all of history. Maybe ‘The Science’ was the Catholic Church when Galileo challenged its biblical worldview. Maybe ‘The Science’ hated the fact that Albert Einstein was just a humble patent clerk, a lone wolf working on the periphery of institutions.
I don’t know. What I do know is that, when a history of science in the 21st Century is written, Scientific American will be but a footnote, if that.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/17/scientific-american-kamala-harris-endorsement/
*************************************************September 17, 2024
Americans Are Losing Hope in the American Dream
The “American dream” has long been a cornerstone of our national identity—the idea that any citizen of the United States, regardless of upbringing or background, can work his or her way to prosperity. It is why nearly 1 in 5 businesses in the country are owned by first-generation Americans. It is borne out in the sharp increase over the past 20 years in college students from economically distressed households. It is also reflected in the “income advancements” we have seen among American families over the past 30 years.
Despite the upward mobility experienced by millions, the American people are losing hope. In newly released polling data published by our organization, the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, 66% of Americans polled believe the concept of the American dream has become “less attainable” over the last 10 years. Only 9% of Americans think the dream has become more attainable.
About 40% of American voters say the American dream is out of reach for them, with young people most likely to agree. It is also a pessimistic sentiment more pronounced for black Americans, who were the least likely to say they have achieved it.
Overall, only 1 in 5 of voters believe they have reached the American dream.
While it is disappointing to see Americans lose hope, it is also an expected outcome after the surging inflation of the past several years. Prices of goods are up an average of 20% since President Joe Biden took office. An analysis published by the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee late last year estimated that, due to inflation, the average household would need to spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain their same standard of living they had prior to January 2021.
The situation has become so dire for some that it was recently reported that more Americans are being forced to choose between paying for food and paying their energy bills. One mother admitted to CBS News, “Sometimes I have to choose whether I’m going to pay the light bill, or do I pay all the rent or buy food or not let my son do a sport?” This is the crushing reality for far too many families as they have tried to stay afloat while coping with the 40-year-high inflation that has gripped prices nationwide.
Homeownership—long considered a staple of the American dream—has also become more difficult for families to achieve. Soaring interest rates, needed to curb runaway inflation, have increased mortgage rates, creating an affordability crisis. A CNN poll found that the overwhelming majority of Americans currently renting “would like to buy a home but can’t afford one.” More than 50% of those asked feel they’ll never be able to own their own home.
It is estimated that due to the rising mortgage interest rates and property costs, “home buyers now need to earn $47,000 more than they did in 2020”—an increase of 80%—to be able to comfortably buy a home, according to a report by Zillow. This is demoralizing for those simply trying to purchase a family home.
All these factors are making Americans less optimistic about their future and their children’s future. Our polling found that more than 50% of Americans believe the United States will be worse off down the road. This national pessimism is toxic for the future of America. If we are going to course correct and deliver a tomorrow that inspires today’s workforce, we need smart policies that will help families climb out of the financial hardships they have had to face over the past several years.
To restore faith in the American dream, we must re-imagine it for today’s world. At the Rainey Center, we have focused our commitment on advancing innovative and actionable solutions that demonstrate a capacity to address some of the nation’s most complex challenges, from advocating for economic empowerment to boosting domestic energy production.
One of the crucial policies we have advocated for is permitting reform, which includes commonsense measures that will lower energy costs for families, lead to more infrastructure development, and reduce bureaucratic red tape. It is also a policy that has broad bipartisan support from the American people—and voters want to see reform, so it is easier to build infrastructure in America. The next administration should immediately move to deregulate energy production and invest in energy innovation to reverse the current economic trend.
The path forward requires policies that both preserve the integrity of the American dream and make it accessible once again. By encouraging fresh ideas, institutions like the Rainey Center—in their collaboration with policymakers at every level of government—can lay the foundation for a new era of opportunity—one where all Americans, regardless of background, can share in the promise of prosperity. Only by embracing bold, inclusive solutions can we ensure the dream remains a tangible goal for future generations.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/13/americans-are-losing-hope-american-dream/
***********************************************Kamala Harris, Pro-Crime Candidate for President
The negative effects of California’s Proposition 47 are well known—a surge in theft, chaos, and lawlessness. Prop 47, a ballot measure approved by voters in 2014, reclassified nonviolent larceny as a misdemeanor so long as the value of the goods stolen is less than $950.
This results are seen in horrifying videos of criminals brazenly riding bikes into drugstores and plundering shelves, stealing bags full of merchandise while impotent clerks and security guards haplessly watch the crime unfold.
What’s less known is that Vice President Kamala Harris was a key champion of getting Prop 47 approved.
Progressives like Harris often bemoan what they describe as “food deserts,” a lack of grocery stores offering more healthy foods in poorer areas.
The truth is, politicians such as Harris who encouraged the very lawlessness that drove out the drugstores and grocery stores don’t advise constituents to stop looting. They punish business owners instead.
The good thing is that California voters have a chance to repeal Proposition 47 through a countermeasure this fall called Prop 36. If voters approve the ballot question, Prop 47 will die.
Harris, however, wants to impose her terrible California worldview nationwide. Harris, the state’s former attorney general, supports ending cash bail for violent criminals.
Democrats’ presidential nominee even helped raise bail money for violent rioters in 2020, including murderers and serial domestic abusers in Minnesota during the George Floyd riots. Sadly, one of those criminals Harris helped free from jail went on to kill someone.
Harris claims to be a candidate of law and order, yet she proposed allowing dealers to sell drugs without fear of criminal prosecution. She prefers that drug dealers face charges only after the third time they are arrested.
“Kamala Harris was the most liberal and progressive district attorney I worked with in over 30 years in the SFPD,” said Kevin Cashman, former deputy chief of the San Francisco Police Department.
Now that’s a difficult title to claim in a liberal city like San Francisco.
But this title makes sense when you know that Harris released a violent MS-13 gang member, Edwin Ramos. Ramos was convicted of murdering a father and his two sons after being released.
Harris shielded illegal immigrant drug dealers from prison. She wiped clean their criminal records and coddled them with job training, even as millions of U.S. citizens are unemployed. Unfortunately, one of these illegal aliens violently assaulted a woman, fracturing her skull.
Harris refused to seek the death penalty against cop killer David Hill. Even the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., disagreed with Harris’ blatant disregard for the law. She criticized Harris for it.
Harris allowed criminals who punched and spit on cops to avoid jail time.
As district attorney of San Francisco, Harris was weak on gun-carrying criminals. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2006: “Police have also challenged Harris over whether she is living up to her promises to get tougher on gun crimes.”
Harris also failed in the courtroom as a prosecutor. San Francisco Weekly reported in 2010: “In the first quarter of 2010, things got worse. During that time, Harris’ office secured guilty verdicts in just 53 percent of its felony trials —a remarkable figure, revealing that defendants accused of serious crimes who took their case to trial had an even one-in-two shot at winning an acquittal.”
Harris’ record as San Francisco district attorney, The Washington Free Beacon reports, includes “lenient plea deals and probation for a string of career criminals—a serial domestic abuser who later murdered his girlfriend, a repeat felon who gunned down a newspaper editor in Harris’ hometown of Oakland, and others.”
Harris was such a crime-friendly district attorney, SF Gate reported, that San Francisco police were forced to do an “end run around Harris’ office by taking several gang-related homicide cases to federal prosecutors.”
For the first time in the history of California, which was founded in 1850, the state is losing a congressional district. That means California is losing people big time.
Residents are fleeing California’s crime for places such as Florida and Texas because of Harris’ failed policies and governance, in San Francisco and statewide.
If Harris becomes president, Americans will have nowhere else to flee because she’ll be running the entire country. We deserve better.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/14/kamala-harris-pro-crime-candidate-for-president/
*******************************************************Cracking The ‘Semantic Games’ Media Use To Make Kamala Look Good
A couple of months ago, everyone agreed Kamala Harris was the worst VP in American history. Now, she’s heralded as the Savior of the Republic.
At first glance, that’s seemingly all it took. After a couple of months of media praise, Harris is up in the polls as the American people seem to have forgotten her long history of radicalism and failure. But is it really that simple?
The Daily Caller’s new documentary, “Cleaning Up Kamala,” shows that the media didn’t simply will this new, “joyful” Kamala into existence. They followed a carefully planned formula to deceive the American people.
Democrats and the media love to talk about The Big Lie: the idea that you can simply repeat a lie over and over again until people believe it. Yet like most things with the Democrat-media complex, this is bait and switch.
Don’t fall for it. Their own lying is far more subtle. As the Daily Caller’s investigative team shows, their lies use “semantic games” to spin half-truths into larger, false narratives. Often, the broad takeaway inverts reality entirely.
Take the lie that Kamala Harris never had anything to do with the Defund the Police movement.
We all know she spent the violent Summer of 2020 cagily tip-toeing around left-wing radicalism. We know she supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bailed rioters out of jail. Yet PolitiFact, one of the nation’s most prominent mainstream fact-checkers, called Donald Trump a liar when he said she supported the Defund the Police movement.
How’d they pull this one off?
Here’s Trump’s full quote:
“They want to defund, she [Harris] wants to defund the police, now she’s pulled back on it,” Trump said at a rally. Note that he uses the past tense.
Now, compare that to was Harris’ said in interviews during the Summer of Love:
“This whole [Defund the Police] movement is about rightly saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities. For too long, the status quo thinking has been you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong,” Harris said on CNN.
This seems to jive with what Trump’s saying. So how does PolitiFact explain rating Trump’s quote as “mostly false?” It all comes down to tenses. They called him a liar for using the present tense, saying Harris “wants” to Defund the Police, even though he clarified that she’s since changed her mind, apparently. Yet they ignore the immediate contextualization in order to call him a liar.
“They know what they’re doing, and unfortunately, a lot of these fact checking websites are getting away with it,” explains Amber Athey, Washington Editor of The Spectator.
This obscures the whole debate about how Harris’ policies evolved, or what they even are. What we should be talking about is how Harris flip-flopped; was she lying then, or if she’s lying now? Instead, the onus falls on Trump. Countless people see this “fact check” and rest assured that Trump is the liar. Harris’ lies aren’t just irrelevant, they all but cease to exist.
As always with Democratic lies, a half-truth inverts the broader reality. The liar gets off scot-free and the truth teller is branded a liar.
This is just one of the many tricks the media re-brand used to re-brand Kamala Harris as a modern day messiah. Watch “Cleaning Up Kamala” today to discover all the dirty tricks they have up their sleeves.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/16/media-kamala-harris-daily-caller-documentary/
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Trump’s road map for taking ‘woke’ out of American education
Donald Trump is vowing to take what he describes as wokeness out of America’s schools if he is elected president. He and allies have a road map for doing so.
The former president has said he would deploy federal powers to pressure schools and universities that he considers to be too liberal. One strategy that he has described would launch civil-rights investigations of schools that have supported transgender rights and racial diversity programs. Another tactic would use the college accreditation system, which sets standards for schools, to scale back diversity goals.
Conservatives have previously decried the use of federal agencies – sometimes derisively called the “deep state” – by Democrats. Now, Trump and his allies have suggested they want to turn the tables.
Unlike many of Trump’s other education proposals — including punishing schools that require vaccines, creating an anti-”woke” online university, and instituting “universal school choice” — these new tactics wouldn’t require state or congressional cooperation. They would likely kick up a legal fight, from school systems, universities and LGBTQ advocates, among others.
In speeches, Trump has also repeatedly pledged to abolish the Education Department.
Trump representatives pointed to his campaign website when asked for further details.
Critical race theory targeted
“Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs,” Trump said in a campaign video earlier this year. “We will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory.” Conservatives have used the term “critical race theory” as a catch-all for liberal ideas about race.
Trump’s platform promises to investigate “any school that engages in race-based discrimination,” though it doesn’t specify which programs he would target.
Several common practices in schools might be subject to scrutiny, said R. Shep Melnick, a professor at Boston College who has studied civil-rights law. Those could include initiatives focused on helping Black or Hispanic students succeed in class; diversity offices that cater mainly to non-white student groups; and lessons on white privilege.
Since last year’s Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, conservatives have brought lawsuits against race-conscious access programs that they say discriminate against white and Asian people.
The threat of an investigation can be as effective as an actual inquiry, according to legal analysts. A few high-profile cases could cause many institutions to change their practices.
“There’s a chilling effect here that cannot be understated,” said Jasmine Bolton, a former civil-rights lawyer in the Biden administration’s Education Department.
‘Transgender insanity’ and Title IX
The Biden administration has interpreted Title IX — the 1972 law that bars sex-based discrimination in educational institutions — to protect transgender people, too. (This rule has been halted by courts in much of the country.)
By contrast, Trump has criticised what he describes as “transgender insanity” in schools. He has suggested that he would flip the Biden’s interpretation of Title IX to say that certain accommodations for transgender people would amount to sex-based discrimination. Trump’s campaign site says he would use the law to bar “men from participating in women’s sports.” In 2020, the Trump administration threatened to pull federal funding from some Connecticut schools over a policy allowing transgender girls to play on female sports teams. Upon taking office, the Biden administration dropped the effort.
Sarah Parshall Perry, a former Trump administration Education Department official and a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said a Title IX violation could occur “when we find biological girls” losing access to “privacy or private spaces,” such as when transgender students use bathrooms or locker rooms aligned with their stated gender identity.
Accreditation as a ‘secret weapon’ Conservatives have criticised accreditation agencies — which set standards for colleges and control access to federal student-aid dollars — as being meddlesome, particularly in campus diversity initiatives.
The agencies are granted recognition by the Education Department, with the help of an advisory committee. Some have called on schools to close gaps in minority graduation rates, or explicitly support the concept of equity.
Trump has signalled intentions to give schools more wiggle room on diversity efforts by up-ending that accreditation system, a tactic he has called his “secret weapon.” Analysts have said such a move could include stripping recognition from some agencies, approving more alternatives, or loosening their watchdog mandates.
Michael Poliakoff, a member of the accreditation advisory committee, and head of the conservative-leaning non-profit American Council of Trustees and Alumni, called accreditors “intrusive” and “micromanaging” and said they have grown overly prescriptive.
Poliakoff’s group served on the advisory board of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, considered by many conservatives as a blueprint for the next administration, although Trump has disavowed it.
The Education Department under Trump limited accreditors’ oversight authority in 2019, including by allowing colleges to get approval from accreditors outside their regions.
Legal fights ahead A new Trump Education Department might face legal hurdles. The Supreme Court recently stopped giving agencies, such as the Education Department, broad leeway in interpreting federal law. Future high-court decisions on transgender rights and race-based policies could affect how the next administration enforces civil-rights law.
Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest, said he is troubled by Trump’s education promises and would be willing to fight them in court. The district receives hundreds of millions in federal dollars.
“We would pursue every opportunity available to us to defend, to protect, to assert the rights of our students,” he said. “I think that we would not be alone in this.”
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Independent and Undecided Voters Largely Aligning with Trump Post-Debate
Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump has been touted as either a draw or a Harris victory by mainstream media pundits, but Independent and undecided voters saw the evening differently. Multiple polls are showing that a majority of undecided voters either decided on backing Trump or leaned towards that decision following the debate. Reuters conducted interviews with a focus group of 10 undecided voters, six of whom said that they would support Trump following the debate. Only three said they would back Harris, while a final voter was still undecided.
“Harris and Trump are in a tight race and the election will likely be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, many of whom are swing voters like the undecided voters who spoke to Reuters,” the news agency noted. “The Trump converts said they trusted him more on the economy, even though all said they did not like him as a person. They said their personal financial situation had been better when he was president between 2017-2021,” Reuters continued, adding, “Four of those six also said Harris did not convince them she would pursue different economic policies than Democratic President Joe Biden, a Democrat they largely blame for the high cost of living.”
Most of the undecided voters interviewed by Reuters said that Harris spent too much time attacking Trump and was “vague” on her own policies. “I still don’t know what she is for. There was no real meat and bones for her plans,” 61-year-old Floridian Mark Kadish told Reuters. Robert Wheeler, a 48-year-old Nevadan, told Reuters that he had been leaning towards Harris prior to the debate but decided on Trump after watching the vice president’s performance. “I felt like the whole debate was Kamala Harris telling me why not to vote for Donald Trump instead of why she’s the right candidate,” Wheeler commented.
The New York Times also interviewed a slate of undecided voters, most of whom were unimpressed with Harris’s showing on debate night. Most voters said that Harris “did not seem much different from Mr. Biden,” and while they acknowledged that Harris “laid out a sweeping vision to fix some of the country’s most stubborn problems,” she offered no details or “fine print” regarding how she would achieve that vision.
While most undecided voters named by NYT simply remained undecided following the debate, a number skewed in favor of Trump. Keilah Miller, a 34-year-old black woman living in Milwaukee, said she had been leaning toward Harris but was disappointed by the vice president’s debate performance. “Trump’s pitch was a little more convincing than hers. I guess I’m leaning more on his facts than her vision,” Miller said. “When Trump was in office — not going to lie — I was living way better. I’ve never been so down as in the past four years. It’s been so hard for me.”
Voter analysis from Fox News also found that Independent voters supported Trump’s positions, expressed in the debate, on immigration and the economy. Even Democrats liked what Trump had to say about taxes, jobs, and inflation. Pollster Lee Carter told Fox News, “Independents are tracking very much with Republicans. They’re looking for a couple of things. They’re looking for answers on immigration, they’re looking for answers on the economy. They want to hear that things will get better for them and they also want change from what is happening right now.” Carter continued, “One of the most important things they were looking for last night from Kamala Harris is how are you going to make it different?”
A post-debate poll from CNN found that while a majority (63%) of voters said that Harris did better overall, Trump performed better on issues of the greatest importance to voters. Trump garnered a 20-point lead (55% to 35%) over Harris when voters were asked who would do better on economic issues, and an even-wider 23-point lead (56% to 33%) on immigration issues. Trump was also ranked a better “commander-in-chief” (49% to 43%) than Harris.
As polling data comes trickling in, Harris has requested a second debate against Trump. So far, the 45th president has refused to commit to a second debate, posting on Truth Social, “In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’ Well, it’s no different with a Debate.” Trump added, “She was beaten badly last night… so why would I do a Rematch?”
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September 15, 2024
Exposing Chameleon Kamala Harris and the great US debate con job
Kamala Harris is attempting to win the US presidency via the most audacious identity theft in modern politics, as evidenced in her essentially preposterous performance in the debate with Donald Trump.
If Harris wins it will be a Harry Houdini moment of escapology, a politician escaping a lifetime’s ideological commitment and political values to campaign as somebody else entirely.
Except on abortion, where she’s making a strong and effective counter-proposal to Trump, Harris spent the debate both lying about Trump, just as he lied about her, and also ditching many of the policies and values that have defined her life and career.
Harris has been a strong advocate of gun control, including mandatory gun buybacks. But in the debate she declared: “Tim Walz (her vice-presidential running mate) and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”
She’s critical of Trump’s proposal for new tariffs, but as Trump pointed out, she and Biden kept all the tariffs he imposed during his first term and added some more. Are Trump tariffs bad, Biden/Harris tariffs good?
She’s been a super-keen green machine politician, net zero all the way, phase out fossil fuel, but quickly, and, until 2020, dead against fracking. Now she loves fracking.
Even more astonishing were her boasts: “I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.” Similarly, she and Biden oversaw “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history” and “the US must reduce its dependence on foreign oil”. She also boasted the US now produced more gas than ever before.
All this is a bizarre turnaround, and surely equals Trump’s many policy flip-flops.
The official position of the Biden administration is to phase out fossil fuels, not produce record amounts of them. The only reason the Inflation Reduction Act had provision for three new offshore oil and gas leases is because Joe Manchin, the retiring conservative Democrat senator from West Virginia, refused to vote for the act and its attendant five-year plan otherwise.
The Biden administration fought Manchin’s initiative, but gave in because there was no other way to get the legislation passed. So Harris is boasting about championing provisions she strongly opposed.
That’s chutzpah.
Had the debate moderators had the slightest interest in consistency, they would have fact-checked Harris on this, or on the many straight-out lies she told.
She said Trump left office with the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. That’s just untrue. The unemployment rate when Trump left office was 6 per cent. That’s nowhere near the highest level since the Great Depression.
Don’t get me wrong. Trump told loads of lies himself. He claimed, for example, that inflation under Biden was the worst in America’s history. That’s absolute nonsense. At its highest point under Biden, inflation was way below levels in the 1980s and the 1920s.
Harris in the past championed decriminalising illegal entry into the US. Now she styles herself a tough border enforcer. Previously, she favoured cutting defence spending. Now she pledges to the US having the strongest, “most lethal” military in the world. She once opposed private health insurance, now she’s all for it. There are countless other examples of Harris abandoning a solid left-wing past for what are almost notional centre-right positions.
To some extent, this is just the normal jigging and jagging of democratic politics, vastly exaggerated. To adapt Bismarck, politics is like a sausage. If you want to enjoy eating it, don’t look too closely at how it’s made.
However, the dynamics of the presidential debate, and the election generally, which is still desperately balanced and way too close to call, reveal deeper structural dynamics in US politics and society that have not been fully recognised.
For a start, Harris’s new positions indicate that on many points of policy and ideology, Trump has won the argument. Trump is probably the least intellectual of any modern US major party presidential candidate. Yet he has in several areas not only disrupted, but revolutionised the accepted wisdom on key policy positions.
Both sides of US politics now view China essentially the way Trump does, as America’s single most formidable and dangerous strategic competitor.
Harris had almost nothing to say about climate change, and certainly no mention at all of that nebulous security blanket, the rules-based international order, but she did want America “to win the competition with China”. Similarly, as outlined above, for the moment at least she’s embraced Trumpian energy policy. She’s newly tough on the border with Mexico. She doesn’t like Trump’s new tariffs but loves his old ones and wants to use tariffs and industry policy to repatriate manufacturing jobs to America.
Second, Harris is receiving lavish, in my view almost wholly unjustified, praise for her debate performance because her supporters feel she disconcerted and discomfited Trump.
Not for substance. Pay attention to the customarily savage dog that hasn’t barked. Harris can turn on a dime to embrace Trump-lite positions on illegal immigration, guns, defence, China, even Israel, and there’s no blowback from the left.
Of course, she plans big tax increases on corporations and the rich, which Trump certainly doesn’t favour. But just the statement that as president she would always ensure Israel has the means to defend itself would have been enough to earn Biden the epithet “Genocide Joe” and would be regarded as one step from fascist militarism from Trump.
But Harris gets a clear pass. This is partly because the left of the Democratic Party, and American society generally, doesn’t believe a word of Harris’s new centrism, and thinks if she becomes president she’ll govern as a committed progressive.
That’s the likely reaction of many working-class voters in Pennsylvania and other Midwestern battleground states. If you really want a pro-fracking, gun-toting, oil drilling, border-controlling president, is Kamala Harris your pick?
Harris has stolen some of Trump’s clothes, but she looks weird in them.
The lack of left-wing blowback to Harris’s sharp rightward tilt in the debate offers a clue to another element of America’s deep social and political polarisation. Both sides of US politics have convinced themselves that the other side is so inherently, quintessentially, at its very core, evil, that anything goes in defeating them.
When Trump first emerged, he did break numerous norms that hadn’t been broken before, especially in the way he lied and abused people. Democrats are now convinced Trump is uniquely evil in the history of America. In fact, Democrats demonised George W Bush and Ronald Reagan in similar fashion, though less intensely.
But Democrats and their media backers have got into such a moral panic over Trump that they now fully equal him in their own norm-breaking, such as through politicised legal prosecutions, politicised mis-use of intelligence agencies, rank unprofessionalism amid much media, and much more.
For the bulk of the American left, Harris telling brazen lies, and adopting positions at odds with everything she and they believe in, (which she’s likely to drop 10 minutes after election), is acceptable because it serves the higher purpose of defeating Trump.
What’s a white lie, or a phony policy, compared with stopping the greatest threat to democracy in American history, after all?
Trump and his supporters are just as bad and have their own ends-justify-means apologies for Trump’s lies and excesses. Their version of the syndrome has it that America is failing, enduring a uniquely dangerous moment, because of the politics-as-usual Washington swamp, led by left-wing Democrats.
That’s why both sides of US politics see the same debate in such radically different ways. For Trump supporters, there was just the usual bit of Trump linguistic imprecision and overstatement in a noble battle to save America. For Harris supporters, a fine leader may need to stoop to dissembling and verbal gymnastics to preserve democracy itself.
Both sides see themselves fighting a moral crusade of purpose that involves moral compromise of methods. In reality, the two sides of politics are routinely behaving worse than at any stage in more than half a century.
This also reflects the culture. Reality has become fluid, the culture plastic. Social media, with its toxic fantasies, is ubiquitous. No one believes in objective truth. There’s no cultural penalty for lying.
The big issue where Harris confronts Trump with strong disagreement is abortion. Harris told numerous lies about this issue during the debate and in her Democratic Convention conference speech. She claims Trump plans a national ban on abortion. That’s not true. Trump has been consistent in wanting the issue resolved, democratically through legislatures and referendums, at the state level. Harris claims Trump wants to limit the availability of IVF fertility treatments. Also not true. Trump has promised to have all IVF treatments paid for by the federal government, or by mandated insurance companies.
Harris and Biden, on the other hand, take the most liberal position regarding abortion law, believing there should be no legal restrictions at all. Many state Republican legislatures, following the overturning of the Roe v Wade ruling, and the subsequent Supreme Court decisions which further liberalised the law, are imposing, or trying to impose, abortion restrictions.
Conservatives have had a bitter experience over abortion politics since Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022. Conservatives long argued that the intensely divisive abortion issue, in which both sides passionately and conscientiously believe they’re defending fundamental human rights, should not be decided by courts but by the democratic political process.
In 1973, when Roe was decided, the courts were more liberal on abortion than the society. Not now. A big majority of Americans, it seems, are substantially if not completely laissez-faire on abortion. This shatters a familiar conservative myth, that there is a vast silent majority of social conservatives in society who are manacled by government rulings and regulations, and if liberated to vote on an issue will generally vote conservative.
This is true on some issues, but absolutely wrong on others. It’s certainly wrong on abortion. A better social issue for conservatives politically was the Supreme Court ending race-based affirmative action. This resulted from a legal case brought by Asian students against discrimination in favour of African-American students. Like the Australian referendum vote against the voice, it wasn’t born of racial hostility but of a desire to affirm universal citizenship and diminish, if not abolish, the divisive civic role of race.
There could be two Supreme Court vacancies in the next presidential term, which provides a huge motive for conservatives to work for Trump’s election.
So who will win?
At time of writing the RealClearPolitics poll average has Harris fractionally leading Trump, 48.4 to 47.3. Tellingly, on that vote, RCP has Trump winning the presidency in the Electoral College, by the tight margin of 281 to 257 (270 Electoral College votes are needed for the presidency). Just before the debate, a New York Times/Sienna poll put Trump 1 per cent ahead. Just after the debate, Policymarket has the race at 50/50.
The Economist/YouGov and Pew polls also call a dead heat. A number of polls have Harris slightly ahead. The RCP average may understate Trump because it includes some polls before the Harris bubble deflated a bit.
Harris is seen as the debate winner, though watching it I thought it a low-performance functional draw or even that Trump might have won narrowly. It’s unlikely to change votes hugely. Biden’s disastrous debate performance only resulted in a very slight drop in his vote. It was all the Democrats demanding he stand down that hurt his numbers more.
Harris got a big bounce from Biden withdrawing and her becoming the candidate, but no bounce at all from the Democratic National Convention. She has rigidly avoided interviews and even in 17 minutes of soft ball tripe from CNN managed to look meandering and vacant. She certainly did better in the debate.
Conventional wisdom thinks Harris needs a 51 or 52 per cent poll vote to be safely assured of victory.C There’s a small rural bias in the Electoral College (resulting from small states having as many senators as large states) which favours Republicans, but this isn’t the main reason Democrats sometimes win more votes but lose the presidency. Rather, Democrats win by huge margins in California and New York, while Republicans win by smaller margins in Texas and Florida. It’s like a parliamentary system. A party can “waste” votes in safe states.
Only seven battleground states are in play – Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada. All other states are spoken for. The battleground states are almost all nearly dead even, with Harris having a small edge in Michigan and Wisconsin. RCP’s Electoral College model with Trump winning 281 to 257 has Harris winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada, but Trump winning all the other battleground states. If everything else stayed the same and he lost either Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia, he’d lose the election.
It’s desperately close. This could even explain Trump’s bizarre “illegal immigrants are eating pet cats and dogs” moment in the debate. Trump succeeds when he gets people to vote who don’t normally vote. Such a bizarre video clip could go viral in the wildest reaches of boys’ only digital swamplands – and lead to a few thousand more Trump votes.
Trump has one big advantage. The polls understated his vote by 2 per cent in the last two elections. If that holds, Harris would have to be much further ahead in the polls than she is now to win.
But Harris has one big advantage. She has much more money than Trump. Democrats, like the teals in Australia at the last election, have so much corporate backing they can hire more people to implement the all-important ground game.
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September 12, 2024
Everyone knows Trump, but after the debate Harris remains a mystery
When John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon faced off for a television debate in 1960, both candidates were new and fresh. Nixon blew a six-point lead with a poor performance and it took 16 years until candidates could agree to debate again.
For most incumbent presidents debates are a disaster. In 2024, with most people around the world feeling grumpy, it pays to be the challenger. Incumbency for every government, from Modi in India to Macron in France, is political arsenic.
Most Americans believe that their country is heading in the wrong direction. Kamala Harris will not win if Americans see her presidency as Joe Biden’s second term.
The Trump/Harris debate was an arm wrestle between two candidates with experience in the White House, but only Donald Trump came across as the outsider. His performance was predictable. It was a more disciplined version of his stock standard rally speech.
Harris outperformed expectations and addressed concerns she may not be up to the job. However, she spent most of the debate either defending Biden policies or attacking Trump. At this stage it won’t be enough.
Until now, polls have both candidates neck and neck. Democrats got a massive bounce out of Biden’s resignation, as the despair about Biden turned into hope with Harris. But the widely anticipated surge after the successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago never eventuated. Harris still remained a policy mystery. For four days everyone spoke about Harris, but she had less than an hour explaining herself and her policies to the electorate.
Harris has avoided tough media and adopted the small target approach of Biden in 2020. That won’t be enough. Biden was well known to most Americans who were uninterested in the daily Washington DC wash. Harris remains comparatively unknown.
It’s the reality that the Democrats need to win the popular vote by more than 2 per cent over the Republicans in order to win the electoral college that chooses the president. Harris hasn’t got that lead yet. She seems to flatline without a big enough margin.
While Trump lost the debate, nothing said or done during the nearly two hours of talk will shift votes between Harris and Trump. If you were voting for either candidate then your vote is unlikely to change.
Trump didn’t screw up and he was his authentic self. If he came out looking like he was souped up on tranquillisers then his voters would have thought he was a fraud. If he was condescending and snarly he would’ve burned off some crucial female voters.
From a presentation perspective, Trump needed to avoid being rude. He was reasonably coherent and effective. Harris needed to be calm and strong. Her personal attacks on Trump were targeted and well researched.
It remains the case that the most important voting demographic for Trump is white women. In 2016 and 2020, he received more of their votes than either Hillary Clinton or Biden. In the election he lost to Biden, too many white women gave up on him and his behaviour.
They are the demographic most attuned to cost-of-living pressures and national security. Trump’s strong words on the exit from Afghanistan and his closure of the Mexican border resonate with these voters. At the same time, they don’t like a bully and Trump was saved from himself by the mute button which the Harris campaign didn’t want.
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has reacted to the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Similarly, an overly aggressive Harris would have turned off her soft vote supporters. It’s much harder for a woman to be aggressive, but Harris performed well in that environment.
This election, more than ever, is about voter turnout. Trump was correct to say he has won more votes than any other candidate for president, apart from Biden in 2020. I suspect Trump will lose few of those votes.
If they voted for him against Biden four years ago, nothing, until now, would cause them to change their vote to Harris. Trump 2.0 is the same as Trump 1.0, but today he is more desperate to win.
Was there anything said or done by the candidates in this presidential debate that will cause an undecided voter to get off the couch and go and stand for three hours waiting to vote in a queue, in the chilly conditions of a Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Michigan autumn? No.
It’s more likely that this election will be decided on policies rather than personalities – and the personality vote is now locked in. For the voters who really matter, the issues discussed in the debate were often peripheral. According to the Pew Research Centre, the No.1 issue for American voters is the economy.
It was the first issue discussed and the debate was orderly and useful. Both candidates prosecuted their cases successfully. After that came abortion. It’s not in the top seven issues for voters.
The abortion vote is already locked in. If it is the deciding issue for a voter, they are already locked in to their candidate. People who have a strong view either way have already decided how they will vote. Similarly, the January 6 vote is locked in, as is the Trump is a criminal vote, the Trump rudeness vote and the Trump is a liar vote.
It took forever to get to health, education, foreign policy, violent crime and immigration.
With all of that, why is the race still too close to call? For too many voters, Harris is still a mystery. Voters want change and Harris has just 55 days to explain why she is different to Biden. We know she is very different to Trump but that’s not enough. She needs to distance herself from Biden and on only two issues she was effective with that – small business and housing.
Trump showed he is different to the Biden/Harris administration on immigration, taxes, tariffs, foreign relations with China, NATO and foreign adversaries, student loans and Ukraine.
On guns and fracking, Harris wants to be close to Trump. On health, Trump wants to be close to Harris. Welfare didn’t get a mention, which would have benefited Harris. Addressing the surge of fentanyl didn’t get much attention either and that would have helped Trump.
Everyone knows Trump and what he stands for. Harris is still too much of a mystery. This election is still too close to call.
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Rurals, Young People, and Hispanics Revert Back Toward Trump after Harris Surge in July
After an initial surge of support for Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden exited the race in July, the polls have narrowed significantly.
Immediately upon announcing her candidacy seven weeks ago, Harris received a bump in support – particularly among key factions of the Democratic base that Biden had been steadily losing ground with for well over a year. Young people, independents, and minorities all appeared more interested in Harris than they were in Biden seven weeks ago, but that picture has shifted, with Harris suffering relatively large declines since early July.
The most striking decline for Harris has been among young people. Young voters had been steadily distancing themselves from Biden for well over a year by the time the president announced his retirement, and for a brief snapshot in time, Harris appeared to be activating at least a portion of young voters, namely young women.
That picture has shifted over the past seven weeks. A New York Times/Siena College poll from July shows Harris earning 59 percent of voters under 30 to former President Donald Trump’s 38 percent among the likely electorate, placing her nearly at the same level (60 percent) as Biden won four years ago.
However, youth enthusiasm has largely fizzled for Harris since the thrill of her “Brat” campaign has worn off. Economic reality has set in, and the latest Times poll from September places Harris at just 51 percent among voters under age 30. This represents an eight-point decline since she announced her candidacy and has nearly erased the gains she briefly held over Biden’s campaign.
Trump, meanwhile, has scrambled back up to 43 percent of the youth vote over the past seven weeks, a five-point gain since Harris became the nominee. Harris’ eight-point decline looks even worse when compared to the total share of the youth vote Biden won in 2020. According to CNN exit polls, Biden won young voters 60 percent to Trump’s 36 percent, meaning Harris is trailing Biden’s 2020 numbers by nine points, while Trump has gained seven points compared to 2020.
Harris’ brief “blip” in youth support right after Biden exited the race does not appear to be sustainable. Trump, however, has been polling around ten points above what he gained in 2020 with young people for over a year now. Democrats are on track to face the November election with a much-reduced pool of youth support compared to 2020, while Republicans have made incremental gains, despite an onslaught of attempts to portray Trump as a dictator. Among all other age groups, Harris’ numbers have stayed relatively stable since she entered the race with only marginal one or two points shifts.
While it isn’t as large of a decline as the numbers among young people, Hispanics have also reduced their support for Harris since she entered the race seven weeks ago, ousting Biden. According to the same Times poll looking at the likely electorate, 60 percent of Hispanics planned to support Harris shortly after she became the nominee, while 36 percent planned to support Trump.
The latest Times poll shows a five-point decline for Harris, with just 55 percent of Hispanics now intending to support her, while 41 percent plan to support Trump. This amounts to a five-point decline for Harris and a five-point gain for Trump over the past seven weeks.
Again, for reference compare Harris’ current standing in the polls to the share of the electorate Biden won in 2020, and the picture is even worse for Democrats. Biden won 65 percent of the Latino vote in 2020, while Trump earned 32 percent. As polls stand seven weeks after Harris announced her candidacy, she is on track to fall short of Biden’s 2020 numbers by ten points, while Trump is expected to gain nine points.
Where else is Harris in trouble? Harris may be suffering a decline in support among rural voters, after earning a small blip in July. Rural voters have increasingly skewed Republican, but just after Biden was ousted Harris was earning around 36 percent of the vote from rural areas to Trump’s 59 percent.
However, seven weeks later she is earning around 31 percent of the rural vote, while Trump has skyrocketed up to 65 percent of the vote. Compared to 2020, this is an eight-point gain for Trump in rural areas, with Trump winning 57 percent of the rural vote four years ago.
For Harris, this represents an eleven-point decline compared to the share of the rural vote (42 percent) Joe Biden earned four years ago. This isn’t that surprising. Biden attempted to portray himself as a simple blue-collar Democrat from Scranton, Pennsylvania, while Harris is a coastal elitist from deep-blue California who is not even attempting to resonate with middle America.
That said, just because Trump has regained footing among groups that were already on the way out the door for Democrats doesn’t mean Harris isn’t seeing an increase in support among certain demographics. City folks and Black voters have flocked to her side in larger numbers over the past seven weeks.
As of July, Harris was having difficulty attracting support from Black voters, but she appears to be gaining. She is up six points with Black voters, going from 72 percent of their vote in July to 78 percent as of early September. While this is a relatively large gain for Harris, she is still polling nine points below the 87 percent of the Black vote Biden won in 2020.
Trump, for his part, is polling at 14 percent of the Black vote in the latest Times poll, which would constitute a modest two-to-three-point gain compared to 2020. It isn’t much, but against a candidate that is being sold to the public as the “first Black female president”, it is worth noting she is doing slightly worse than Biden.
Then, there are city dwellers, another group that appears to be consolidating their support behind Harris. July’s poll had Harris earning a comfortable 59 percent of the city-folk vote, but that number has climbed to 63 percent. This represents a slight gain over the 60 percent of the city vote Biden earned in 2020, indicating Harris could beat Biden’s numbers among city dwellers.
In short, the longstanding demographic losses for Democrats among young voters and Hispanics which Americans for Limited Government and others have been covering for well over a year now appear to be “real” at least according to polls.
Young voters and Hispanics have been shifting away from Democrats over the past four years due to the Biden Administration’s mishandling of key issues like inflation and immigration, and they do not appear to be circling back just because Kamala Harris is heading the ticket now.
The urban/rural divide is likely to be even larger this election than it was in 2020, with Trump further consolidating support among rural Americans and Harris gaining over Biden’s numbers among urbanites. Black voters like Harris more than they liked Biden seven weeks ago as he teetered out of the race, but they still like her less than they liked the Biden of 2020.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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September 11, 2024
3 on 1: Trump Clashes With Harris—and the Debate ‘Moderators’
ABC’s debate moderators’ performance in Tuesday night’s presidential debate made CNN’s performance in June look like a master class in fairness, objectivity, and balance.
It was exactly the kind of debate moderation left-wing commentators on X have been demanding for months—years, really.
They don’t want anything approaching objectivity. They wanted moderators to “fact-check” former President Donald Trump every step of the way while allowing his opponent to pontificate on questions they think will be beneficial to Democratic Party fortunes.
And that’s essentially what happened.
ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis continually “fact-checked” Trump in real time, arguing with him after nearly every answer. That makes for a horrible debate format.
Were the Lincoln-Douglas debates fact-checked by interjecting moderators? Of course not. The debate was between the two men and their ideas.
But in Tuesday night’s debate, the moderators didn’t even bother to create the mirage of objectivity. They hounded Trump every step of the way while stepping aside to allow Harris to make her points. They weren’t fact-checking on behalf of the American people, they were interjecting on behalf of their partisan interest.
The fact-checks weren’t even particularly accurate, not that that really seemed to matter to the moderators. For instance, when Trump said that Democrats in some states support after-birth abortion, Davis interjected that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after birth.”
As The Daily Signal has reported, there are many states—including Minnesota, the home state of Harris’ running mate Gov. Tim Walz—that allow babies who survive abortions to die.
Harris didn’t get this treatment at all. Moderators politely allowed Harris to say whatever she wanted.
Even in the most obvious case of Harris going with the tired fabrication about Trump calling white supremacists “very fine people” in Charlottesville, Va.—fact-checked as false by even the reliably left-wing Snopes—Muir and Davis said nothing.
The fix was in.
To a certain extent, left-wing journalists demanding this kind of rigging is understandable. They know that the ABCs and the CNNs of the world are in the tank for their candidates. Why not use their power of control over these debates to direct it in a way that benefits Democrats, who are so clearly on the right side of history?
That mentality won out on Tuesday night and lefty commentators were giddy on social media.
“I will say it ABC moderators have exceeded expectations. They are fact-checking and confronting, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin posted on X. “Shows how abysmal CNN was.”
That mirrors how the Left generally thinks all our society’s institutions should work. Alternatives to the narratives the Left peddles should be carefully managed and massaged so the people are led to only one point of view.
That’s why the Left had a full-blown meltdown when entrepreneur Elon Musk bought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. It meant that they would no longer have the power to put the finger on the lever of amplifying the messages they like while suppressing the ones they don’t.
But this sort of bias comes at a cost. Institutions that ply on their objectivity as their main selling point risk surrendering the power of that credibility when they blatantly put their finger on the scale for a particular ideology.
The public’s attitude toward ABC and their cohorts and the media has followed the same course as public health institutions in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns. When after months of telling everyone to lock down for everyone else’s safety, they largely came out in favor of Black Lives Matter protests because “racism is the real pandemic,” they lost an enormous number of American who will never trust them again.
ABC’s moderators’ performance Tuesday night is a perfect example of why we have “populism.”
Did Trump fall into the traps ABC and the Harris campaign set in this 3-on-1 debate? Yes, probably. They will now pat themselves on the back and think of it as a job well done until Election Day.
With some Americans, that’s all good and well. Trump is too dangerous to be given a fair shake. With a fair debate, the people may choose poorly.
But the stacked deck highlighted the theme that Trump has always used to great success with his supporters since he became the Republican presidential nominee the first time way back in 2015. The system is rigged against you. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters.
That message was driven home on Tuesday night. Maybe this was mission accomplished for ABC, but Muir and Davis did a disservice to the American people and certainly discredited themselves.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/11/trump-takes-harris-moderators/
*****************************************************Harris fails to make her case on inflation, real wages and fundamental freedoms
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement commenting on tonight’s presidential debate:
“America finally got to hear Kamala Harris as she once again failed to address the critical issues facing our nation, providing no answers to the continued high costs of food and housing and the decline in America’s real wages. The Harris-Biden inflation has destroyed many Americans’ hope to achieve the American dream. Continuing the Harris economic policy for another four years will result in higher taxes and bigger deficits that already have us on the brink of recession. Continuing with open borders endangers public safety, our schools and communities. And an expansion of the weaponized administrative state threatens our fundamental constitutional freedoms. Americans who care about their children’s future will vote to return Donald Trump to the Oval Office, after all, weak and stupid is no way to run a country.”
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‘Kamala Harris Is Running a Giveaway Campaign’: Economist
Ben Johnson
As presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris approach their first debate on Tuesday, their campaigns have unveiled economic policies that seem in some ways diametrically opposed — and only one could stimulate “robust economic growth,” a leading economist has warned.
Harris has proposed imposing price controls on food, undoing the Trump tax cuts of 2017 by raising the top tax rate to 39.6%, hiking corporate taxes and capital gains taxes to 28%, giving first-time homebuyers $25,000, and doubling down on Obamacare by raising taxpayer-funded subsidies for those who buy their plans from the exchange.
She also proposed one tax cut to benefit small businesses. “I want to see 25 million new small business applications by the end of my first term,” said Harris last week. “So, part of my plan is we will expand the tax deduction for startups to $50,000.”
In a speech at the Economic Club of New York last Thursday, former President Trump proposed unleashing the power of the free market by maintaining the 2017 tax cuts and further slashing the corporate tax from 21% to 15%, cutting red tape, protecting U.S. manufacturing by raising tariffs on imported goods, clawing back all unspent funds from the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, and making more jobs available to U.S. citizens by deporting illegal immigrants who lower wages and compete for jobs.
Both candidates agree on ending federal taxation on tips, a policy first proposed this presidential race by Trump and parroted by Harris.
“Kamala Harris is running a giveaway campaign,” Paul Mueller, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm last Thursday. “Of course, the Biden administration has been trying to cancel various forms of student debt for years now. And her approach, I think, to stimulating the economy is more of what we’ve seen over the past four years, which is extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending. It’s not really an organic growth within the economy.”
Artificial stimulus raises prices, a major problem over the course of the Biden-Harris administration. “When you subsidize people’s ability to buy things — whether that’s higher education or health care — and we give people money in the form of loans or grants or scholarships to do that, what it does is boosts demand. And so what we see over time in both of those areas is rising costs. The cost of higher education has grown much faster than everything else in the economy. The rate of increase for health care has increased very rapidly,” Mueller stated. “And so this $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers, while it sounds nice, it’s actually going to continue to put upward pressure on the price of housing overall.”
The entire amount of the subsidy is “actually going to be eaten up by rising prices,” Mueller noted.
Even a putatively pro-business tax policy like a small business tax credit could backfire. “There are a lot of small business owners who maybe will close down their existing business and start a new one just to get the tax credit,” Mueller warned.
On the other hand, “President Trump’s agenda” has the potential to spur “robust economic growth” in an organic way, said Mueller. “He has talked about wanting to roll back regulations.”
Mueller noted he opposed Trump’s tariff policy, “and, then, he hasn’t really addressed runaway government spending. And the more money that is spent by the federal government, the less money there is for people in the private sector to spend on their businesses, their houses, their projects.”
Backholm suggested the greatest vacuum in economic dialogue involves America’s $35 trillion national debt. “So far, we are not seeing a lot of politicians raise their hand and say, ‘I’m the guy that’s going to give you less so we can save the future.’ I think that might be what we need. We’re not getting that from anybody at this point.”
https://washingtonstand.com/news/kamala-harris-is-running-a-giveaway-campaign-economist
*************************************************10 September, 2024
Kamala Harris Campaign Platform Makes Promises Based on False Assumptions
Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ nominee for president, finally released her policy platform Monday, a little over 24 hours before her first debate with former President Donald Trump.
The Harris platform makes various claims about the root causes of issues faced by America and the way Harris plans to address those issues. The claims underlying her policy promises are false, however.
Here is a look at what the Harris campaign released under the title “A New Way Forward.”
Harris Vows to ‘Secure Border’ After 4 Years of Open Borders
Harris’ policy platform says that, if elected, she will “secure our border and fix our broken immigration system.” The Biden-Harris administration, however, abruptly shifted the nation’s border policies on Day One, enabling a massive influx of illegal immigrants since 2021.
The platform focuses on “the bipartisan border bill” that failed to pass the House of Representatives in 2023 and suggests the legislation would solve illegal immigration.
The platform blames Trump for “killing the bipartisan border bill” although out of office and thereby failing to solve the border crisis. The platform states that Harris would sign the legislation, suggesting that nothing more is needed to solve the underlying issues.
Congressional Republicans, however, said the border bill was political posturing and not a true effort to secure the border.
The bill “spends $20 billion to not secure the border, but to more efficiently encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told reporters.
Harris arguably shares responsibility for the border crisis with President Joe Biden, who tasked her in March 2021 with solving the “root causes” of illegal immigration from three Central American nations. That’s when both supporters and critics began referring to Harris as Biden’s “border czar.”
Harris Says Equality Act Will ‘Protect Civil Rights and Freedoms’
Harris now promises to “protect civil rights and freedoms” by passing the Equality Act to “enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.”
But critics say the Equality Act would undermine women’s civil rights in order to help a minority of men who claim to be women.
The bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It would force schools and other programs to allow biological males who “identify” as females to compete against girls and women in sports and use private female facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms.
Harris Blames Inflation on Price Gouging, Not Government Spending
Harris’ policy statement on inflation suggests again that price gouging, not government spending, is the central driver of rising prices.
“As president, she will direct her administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers,” the campaign website states.
However, as Heritage Foundation budget expert EJ Antoni pointed out, there is a far more obvious culprit: government spending.
Antoni, an economist, noted: “One of the functions of money is that of a measuring tool. If a yardstick were to shrink from 36 inches down to just 30, it would take 120 of these shortened yardsticks to cover the distance of a football field, instead of 100. As the dollar has lost value, it takes more dollars to measure the value of the things we buy.”
If price gouging caused 40-year record-high inflation, Antoni asked, did businessmen “magically” become greedy when Biden and Harris took office?
“Were corporations never greedy in the 40 years leading up to Biden’s inflationary expansion of government?” he asked. “Businesses haven’t even passed all their higher costs on to consumers; if they’re trying to be greedy, they’re doing it all wrong.”
Harris’ policy platform also tacitly admits that it is implausible that price gouging is responsible for increases in prices. The platform notes that her “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries” would “build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states.”
If bans on price gouging were the solution to inflation, wouldn’t these bans have prevented the problem in those 37 states?
Harris Promises Crackdown on Iran, Though Biden-Harris Admin’s Loose Sanctions Netted Regime Billions
Harris’ platform talks a tough game on Iran, the world’s top sponsor of radical Islamist terrorism.
A section on keeping America safe proclaims: “Vice President Harris will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to protect U.S. forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.”
Tehran is the top financial sponsor of the terrorist group Hamas, which infamously slaughtered 1,139 Israelis—including women and children—on Oct. 7 in southern Israel.
Harris’ new policy pronouncements overlook the fact that the Biden-Harris administration loosened U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, netting the Islamist regime $71 billion more before Oct. 7 than under Trump-Pence administration policies.
If Harris would “never hesitate” to protect U.S. interests from Iran, did she object to the administration’s move to loosen sanctions?
Harris Repeats Widely Debunked Claim That Trump Campaign Created Project 2025
The Harris policy platform includes several tabs contrasting the vice president’s positions with what it calls “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda,” although Trump repeatedly has distanced himself from The Heritage Foundation-led Presidential Transition Project.
In fact, a campaign official for Harris already has acknowledged that the vice president has deliberately misled voters about Project 2025.
Harris and her campaign repeatedly have tried to link Project 2025 to Trump, despite the former president’s pushback.
In a particularly ironic claim, Harris said Trump would implement his Project 2025 agenda to consolidate power, bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power, go after opponents, and “rule as a dictator on ‘Day One.’”
However, the Biden-Harris Justice Department targeted pro-lifers and other Americans with dissenting political and religious views, particularly after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and abortion on demand in June 2022.
For instance, a Michigan jury recently found seven pro-life activists guilty of engaging in a conspiracy against rights and violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, for peacefully protesting outside an abortion clinic.
The charges against the pro-life activists were brought by DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.
Launched two years ago by The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has grown to a coalition of 110 conservative organizations that developed a transition plan for the next presidential administration. The Heritage-led coalition considers its work to be nonpartisan and offers it to whoever occupies the White House in January 2025.
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Peaked too soon? Poll puts Harris behind Trump ahead of debate
The surge in support for Kamala Harris has faded, a new poll suggests, leaving Donald Trump ahead in the run-up to what may be the only televised debate between the candidates, scheduled for Wednesday (AEST).
For the first time in a month Trump is narrowly ahead, with 48 to 47 per cent support nationwide among those likely to vote, according to the New York Times/Siena College poll. It also showed that nearly a third of Americans felt that they needed to learn more about Harris and where she stands on the issues that matter to voters. Only 9 per cent felt that way about Trump.
A survey by CBS News of voters in three swing states showed Harris ahead by a single point in Michigan and Wisconsin, and tied with Trump in the crucial battleground of Pennsylvania. A YouGov poll last week, commissioned by The Times, put Harris ahead in four swing states and Trump in three.
Wednesday’s television debate, in Philadelphia, will be held without a studio audience, but with a vast one watching at home.
Trump has repeatedly warned – without evidence – that there may be widespread fraud in the coming election, and suggested that he may not accept the result if he loses. He went further at the weekend by declaring on his social media platform Truth Social, and on X, that he would, as president, target “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” involved “in unscrupulous behaviour”.
They would be “prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country” and they would face “long term prison sentences”, he added.
Harris has been preparing for the debate in a hotel in Pittsburgh with Philippe Reines, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, playing the role of Trump in rehearsals. He is known for taking a meticulous approach, dressing up in a voluminous dark suit and a bright tie, and even wearing lifts in his shoes to boost his height.
Trump has more experience than any recent candidate in presidential debates, having taken part in six, and his team have maintained that he does not require “prep” but rather takes part in a series of policy discussions. However, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who during the primary debates of 2019 landed blows on Harris’s record as a prosecutor, has said she is helping Trump to prepare. Several leading Republicans have urged him to focus on policy differences, rather than personal attacks.
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who was Trump’s most significant opponent in the primaries, said yesterday that she was “on standby” to help in his campaign if asked.
The Siena College poll suggested that this may be an advantage for Trump. Only a third of voters appeared to feel that he was “too far to the right”, while 48 per cent believed that Harris was “too liberal”.
The Trump campaign hailed the poll as more accurate than other recent ones. “The simple truth is that when a survey reflects the actual electorate, President Trump is in the lead,” it said.
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9 September, 2024
America’s sick kids are the new political battleground
An hilarious new US campaign ad, styled as a drug ad complete with symptoms, side-effects, testimonials and a gravely concerned voice-over, treats TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome – as a genuine disease. The remedy is ‘Independence’, but the narrator intones ‘Independence may not be right for you. Ask your doctor’. The ad went viral, hitting five million views in its first week, and exciting much comment.
It was the witty work of the effective Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr’s running mate and lawyer, a reformed Democrat and committed health advocate coming to prominence after the recent union of the Trump campaign with RFK Jnr’s push. Her latest follow-up ad plays powerfully on the JFK and RFK assassinations, and urges ‘Finish the Story, Bobby’. It brought a tear to this old Boomer’s eye and rocketed to over 3 million views on its first day.
Unexpected synergies are emerging from the freshly combined energies of MAGA, and the newly created MAHA, Make America Healthy Again. Shanahan herself says that Democrats throttled and sabotaged the RFK Jnr campaign, and she’s enjoying the bigger platform and audience that the Trump campaign is giving their issues, appearing widely in all forms of media. If X is anything to go by, the MAGA crowd is loving Shanahan and her health views right back.
More to the point, a potent sleeper issue is now emerging in the race to the White House, and that issue is health, specifically children’s health. Few issues have the power to move mothers’ votes like their sick kids.
The voting gender gap is an area of notorious weakness for Trump, whose womanising and old-style masculine braggadocio turns off the misses of the #MeToo era. A CBS News poll in mid-August found that 54 per cent of men broke for Trump but only 44 per cent of women. Young women are a demographic that Trump needs, and he is promoting MAHA and RFK Jnr vigorously; Kennedy is spoken of as Trump’s likely health czar.
One small recent poll shows Kennedy voters breaking two-for-one for Trump, but many of Kennedy’s old hippies and alternative lifestylers will never contemplate voting Trump. However, RFK Jnr’s endorsement of Trump will provide cover for some, especially women, to change their vote, as the only way to improve a society ruined with processed, sugary foods and jabbed to near-infinity by a Centers for Disease Control which recommends more than 70 vaccinations by the time children reach 18.
Shanahan herself, billionaire ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, tags her X account Healthy Planet and Healthy Humans. She has skin in the game, with an autistic child. The whole thrust of RFK Jnr’s campaign, and his life’s work, is to clean up America’s corrupted and toxic food, farming and institutional systems; few have been more personally affected by US evils than he has, and his corporate knowledge is second to none.
While RFK Jnr’s family has virtually disowned him, he has the runs on the board as an environmental litigator of note and success, and chairs the Children’s Health Defense, which has long attacked issues such as fluoridation in water, dangerous chemicals, excessive vaccinations and the US’s highly processed and adulterated food supply, heavy with sugars, seed oils and chemicals of unknown combined effect.
It is too early to tell if this will move the election needle, with no clear signal yet in the polling of any RFK Jnr boost for Trump. However, there are promising signs of traction on social media for the MAHA message. This crystallised for me when I heard young conservative podcaster Alex Clark, whose audience is aged 25 to 35, report that leftist influencer mums are contacting her to say they will hold their noses and vote for Trump for the sake of their children’s health.
Politically, health campaigning has all too often been expensive promises about benefits, more drugs and surgery, more hospitals and research, and cheaper medicines, but rarely has the underlying system itself been examined. It’s a sickness system, rather than a health creation system, and long overdue for a clean-up.
There’s clearly a crisis when the nation that spends by far the most on health care per capita globally achieves devastatingly bad, and worsening outcomes, well below that of similar developed countries. US life expectancy is far below that of comparable countries, falling to around 48th globally in recent figures, below Albania and Greece. Autism rates are now 1 in 36 children in the US, yet for US Boomer generations, RFK Jnr says it was 1 in 10,000. Around 40 per cent of US children have a chronic disease, and 60 per cent of adults. Some 40 per cent of Americans are obese, compared with 3 per cent of Japanese. Another 30 per cent are overweight.
America is sick, and one needs only arrive in a US airport to suddenly notice bulging uniforms and vanishing jawlines, amid a reported $1 billion-a-month avalanche of prescription drug ads, the US being one of only two countries in the world permitting them. Big Pharma is the biggest lobbyist in Washington, and the revolving door between US regulatory agencies and big corporations is notorious. In a startling recent example of regulatory capture, as reported on Daily Wire from FoIA-ed emails, EPA clean air boss Joe Goffman asked a chemical lobbyist what he needed to do on a particular issue. ‘Dance You Monkey, Dance’ came the contemptuous reply.
The danger of ultra-processed foods is at last being understood, with California lawmakers recently becoming the first to ban schools from serving foods with six artificial ingredients linked to low IQ, behavioural problems and cancer; RFK Jnr recently told Fox that almost 1,000 chemicals banned in EU foods are still widely used in US foods. Leftist media icon Bill Maher frequently attacks the pill-happy US medical system, and said ‘enabler’ doctors killed performers Matthew Perry, Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Prince and Elvis.
If the Trump campaign can publicise the shocking truths of America’s illness epidemics via the addition of RFK Jnr’s truth bullets, then not only the US but countries downstream, such as Australia, will benefit, and our children most of all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-kennedy-factor/
*****************************************Demise of the old Dems: Hollywood elites have taken over the workers’ party
Political parties can change over time and morph into a new entity whilst retaining their outward appearance. The transition can be difficult to detect, especially for those intimately involved in the day-to-day machinations of the parties. Often an event highlights a change that has been underway for some time. Such was the defection of Robert F. Kennedy Jnr from the Democratic party and his subsequent endorsement of Donald Trump. It was an event that marked the end of the old Dems. It is not so much that RFK Jnr has changed: the Democratic party itself has been steered a long way from the moorings of his father and uncle. It seems often that the only thing the Democratic party of the 1960s shares with the party today is the name.
Mr Kennedy’s withering critique of the modern party is a measure of the change. Recalling that he attended his first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960, he summarised the changes. ‘Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, against imperialism, and against unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy. As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money.’
Whether readers agree with Kennedy about the various issues he mentioned or not, his analysis is pertinent. ‘What alarms me [most] is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponisation of the federal agencies. When a US president colludes with, or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression. And that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.’
The new Democratic party is the home of the Silicon Valley capitalists, the progressive not-for-profits, the Hollywood elite, and a wealthy east coast oligarchy typified by the Obamas.
It was the Hollywood elite led by George Clooney who told Biden to go; it was Billy Baldwin who chastised RFK for supporting Trump. It was Quentin Tarantino who instructed Harris not to do any interviews. Look up the biography of most Hollywood celebrities: almost all of them are Democrat supporters and financial contributors. In 2023, Vice President Harris spent more time in California than almost all the other states of America combined.
It was the Obamas who abandoned Biden when it became clear that he was no longer useful and would lose to Trump. It was this same coalition that fought off the real socialists in the party such as Bernie Sanders and the Gang of Four.
Rereading John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech to the Democratic convention in July 1960, it is difficult to imagine how he could be a member of the Democratic party today. ‘The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride. It appeals to our pride, not our security – it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security…. That is the choice that our nation must make – a choice that lies not merely between two men or two parties, but between the public interest and private comfort – between national greatness and national decline – between the fresh air of progress and the stale, dank atmosphere of ‘normalcy’ – between dedication or mediocrity.’
Much of what JFK said in that speech and many others could be uttered by mainstream Republicans in more recent times.
The change in the party is profound. To take one example: there are no more pro-life Democratic members of Congress. A few years ago, a colleague from the US told me that he was the last pro-life Democrat member of Congress. He has since lost his primary to the new forces. The impact of this change was on full display at the Democrat National Convention, complete with its attendant brash abortion clinics. Ms Harris, as Californian Attorney General was at the forefront of efforts to harass pro-life centres until the pursuit was curbed by the US Supreme Court. And another example: a Teamsters boss spoke at the Republican National Convention, not at the convention of the party historically supportive of the working class. Many wealthy professionals are happy to employ migrants, especially the low paid. Standing up for the workers, as past generations of Democratic leaders did, has largely dissipated.
Win or lose, 2024 marks the end of the traditional Democratic party. Joe Biden will come to be seen as the last of the old Democrats, politically executed when no longer of service to the new rulers. Kamala Harris was not their preferred choice, but now ensconced as the presidential candidate, the force of the ruling coalition is being thrown behind her campaign. Witness the amount of money raised in just a couple of weeks. Mr Trump ignores this phenomenon at his peril. Most of the new Democrats are no more socialist than the wealthy capitalists who fund the Teals in Australia.
Instead of attacking Ms Harris, Mr Trump would be advised to stick to his core messages about the economy, the cost of living and illegal immigration. The working class have much to lose from uncontrolled immigration and the most vocal critics are usually migrants themselves.
This historic shift is not confined to the Democratic party. The Republican party of Ronald Reagan and the Bush family is now the Trump movement. The gulf between Ronald Reagan’s acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in Detroit in July 1980 and Mr Trump’s remarks in Milwaukee is as wide as the Midwest.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/demise-of-the-old-dems/
***********************************************8 September, 2024
The New York Times’ Weird Attack on JD Vance
Once again, corporate media is painting a conservative lawmaker’s mainstream views as out-of-touch and bizarre.
In 2017, JD Vance, then known for authoring his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” wrote an introduction to The Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index for Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays and charts looking at the state of families and prosperity in the United States.
Cue the freakout from The New York Times and others.
“Years before he became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance endorsed a little-noticed 2017 report by The Heritage Foundation that proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families,” wrote New York Times reporter Lisa Lerer in an article published Tuesday.
Others quickly piled on.
“The vice-presidential candidate previously endorsed a collection of almost 30 essays by ultraconservative thinkers on restricting reproductive rights and other freedoms,” wrote The Daily Beast. Business Insider fretted that “JD Vance endorsed a report that criticizes people watching pornography.” MSNBC said Vance’s introduction “has come back to haunt him,” saying the index “includes essays that espouse right-wing talking points, targeting single-parent households, divorce rates, welfare programs, and housing assistance.”
The Times, for its part, decided to use a sentence I wrote for the 2017 index to show just how insane they think Vance is.
“Authors argued in the 2017 report that women should become pregnant at younger ages and that a two-parent, heterosexual household was the ‘ideal’ environment for children,” wrote Lerer.
She added, “‘The ideal situation for any child is growing up with the mother and father who brought that child into the world,’ wrote Katrina Trinko, a conservative journalist, in an essay detailing the ‘tragedy’ of babies born to single mothers.”
Now to be clear, as both Vance’s spokesperson and The Heritage Foundation have said, Vance had no editorial control or approval over my essay or any of the others in the 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity.
And for the record, while The New York Times couldn’t be bothered to include it, I also wrote in that essay, “Every parent who chooses life in adverse circumstances should be commended. Many single moms and dads, whether due to later circumstances or a surprise pregnancy, have nobly risen to the task and done an amazing job of raising their children …”
But let’s look at my supposedly radical claim that the ideal should be kids growing up with both parents.
First, my view is actually the mainstream view.
Nearly half of Americans (47%) think that single women raising kids on their own is bad for society, while only 10% think it’s a good thing for society, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll.
That’s not surprising—because the data clearly shows that kids do best when raised by a married mom and dad.
In fact, if Lerer had just read her own outlet, she would know that. In a 2023 commentary headlined “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing,” economics professor Melissa Kearney writes, “The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood.”
In Kearney’s book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” she explored whether the disadvantages children of single parents faced could be explained by income or education differences between single parents and married parents.
But the data shows that it’s the family formation, not simply parents’ education and income, that affect the children. “A child born in a two-parent household with a family income of $50,000 has, on average, better outcomes than a child born in a single-parent household earning the same income,” writes Kearney.
Meanwhile, among kids who have a married mom with a bachelor’s degree, 57% have a bachelor’s degree of their own by age 25, according to Kearney. But among kids who have a single mom with a bachelor’s degree, only 28% have a bachelor’s degree by age 25.
Funnily enough, while the elites may attack Vance for daring to espouse traditional values, their own behavior suggests they actually agree with him.
“Many elites today—professors, journalists, educators, and other culture shapers—publicly discount or deny the importance of marriage, the two-parent family, and the value of doing all that you can to ‘stay together for the sake of the children,’ even as they privately value every one of these things. On family matters, they ‘talk left’ but ‘walk right,’” observes Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, in a February Atlantic essay.
Wilcox, author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” noted that a 2022 survey found that a mere 30% of college-educated liberals agreed that children are better off if they have two married parents. (In contrast, 91% of college-educated conservatives agreed with this.) But these college-educated liberals are not themselves going on to become single parents: “69% of the parents within this same group [college-educated liberals] were themselves stably married,” writes Wilcox.
So apparently, Vance’s real crime isn’t daring to live by traditional values. It’s that he actually shares those views out loud.
Vance, as many know from his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” did not grow up in a stable, two-parent family. His parents divorced when he was young, with his dad essentially disappearing. His mother married five times and struggled with drug addiction. Vance was ultimately raised by his grandparents.
There was eventually a happy ending for his mom—Vance proudly shared at the Republican National Convention that she was 10 years sober from drugs—but it came long after Vance’s childhood.
Vance’s essay in the 2017 index highlights how, years before he became an Ohio senator, he was frustrated by the refusal of the elites to look at how culture shaped outcomes of Americans.
“[P]urely economic questions miss something important about our current moment. Too rigid a focus on the material permits us to divorce concerns about opportunity from those about culture. In some ways, this is understandable: The comfort zone of many elites, and thus, their language trends toward the mathematical and technocratic,” he wrote before concluding, “But talk about it we must, because the evidence that culture matters should now overwhelm any suggestion to the contrary.”
Vance later added:
Recognizing the importance of culture is not the same as moral condemnation. We should not glance quickly at the poor and suggest that their problems derive entirely from their own bad decisions before moving on to other matters. Rather, we should consider the very intuitive fact that the way we grow up shapes us. It molds our attitudes, our habits, and our decisions. It sets boundaries for how we perceive possibilities in our own lives.
Culture, in other words, must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as “the least of these.” It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse that speaks often about the vulnerable even as it regularly fails to help them. [Emphasis mine.]
That last sentence struck me because it gets to the heart of what sets apart the Yale-educated Vance from his elite peers: A desire to actually help people, even if it means being courageous and saying something politically incorrect.
But for refusing to be hypocritical, to live one way and talk another way, Vance is getting crucified by the Left. That’s not surprising. But if we’re serious about helping Americans live better lives, we need fewer sneering New York Times pieces and more Vances.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/06/new-york-times-weird-attack-vance/
****************************************************Harris is no champion of women
Vice President Kamala Harris claims to be a champion for women, but many facts tell a different story.
Harris speaks pro-women rhetoric, but fails to protect women and girls from assaults in locker rooms.
Harris endorsed a new Biden-Harris administration rule expanding Title IX protections to gender identity and sexual orientation, requiring schools receiving federal funds to allow males into female spaces such as restrooms and locker rooms, or into any activity currently separated as male or female.
Initial Title IX rules—signed into law by a Republican president more than 50 years ago—protect women and girls against sex-based discrimination, allowing girls to flourish in school and on extracurricular sports teams.
Regrettably, this final rule redefining “female” also threatens free speech on campus, protects teachers unions, and obstructs due process protections for students accused of sexual harassment on campus.
Harris also fails to protect women and girls from sexual assault as they seek to cross illegally into America at the U.S. southern border. Sexual assault rates of migrant women coming to the United States is shocking, yet Harris embraces policies that incentivize further illegal immigration and human trafficking.
Reports vary widely on the scope of the sexual violence, which speaks to the lack of concern that Harris embodies. Amnesty International reported:
Rape is widespread. It is believed that as many as six out of every 10 migrant women and girls experience sexual violence during the journey.
A 2017 report by Doctors Without Borders found 1 in 3 women traveling through Mexico are sexually assaulted. A United Nations estimate found among women crossing without husbands or families, up to 70% suffered some type of abuse.
The rampant sexual abuse is perpetuated and grows the more policies like those from Harris and President Joe Biden encourage millions to enter the United States illegally. For example, under former President Donald Trump, the “Remain in Mexico” program and other immigration policies substantially slowed illegal immigration flow. Harris and Biden reversed Remain in Mexico, and the United States has experienced record, earth-shattering illegal immigration flows. Supposedly empowered to mitigate the so-called root causes of illegal immigration from Central American and South American countries, Harris instead stood idly by.
Even CNN is conceding that Harris is now a hypocrite for using Trump’s border wall in her new political ad to claim she supports controlling illegal immigration. CNN found more than 50 instances since 2017 of Harris slamming Trump’s border wall, with labels like “useless” and “racist.” But now Harris is running ads touting Trump’s wall.
Harris also harms America’s seniors, who are disproportionately female as women have longer life spans than men. In her role as president of the Senate, Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to raid Medicare.
Harris voted for the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, which is treating the Medicare Part D prescription-drug program for seniors as a piggy bank for the reckless spending on other, unrelated programs.
This comes on top of painful, cumulative 20% inflation on Harris’ watch, which disproportionately harms senior women, many of whom live on fixed incomes after retirement and don’t have jobs with pay keeping pace with inflation.
Harris also failed the women of Afghanistan, who are now relegated to chattel status under the Taliban due to the reckless Biden-Harris U.S. withdrawal from the country.
Harris is effectively silent on the horrific treatment of Afghan women by the Taliban, which just passed a law banning women from speaking in public, showing any skin, or looking at men they aren’t related to.
The Biden-Harris administration is directly responsible for the results of the bloody and botched Afghanistan withdrawal, yet Harris says nothing and makes zero effort to help Afghan women.
In fact, Harris has the audacity to claim, three years later, that the chaotic withdrawal decision was “courageous and right.” It was neither courageous nor right to relegate women to slave status and in the process also allow the killings of 13 U.S. service members and recklessly abandon the tens of billions of dollars in weapons and other military equipment left behind.
Pushing people to vote for a female candidate because of her gender is just as sexist as pushing voters to select a man because he’s male. Voters must see through Harris’ misogynistic policies and demand better.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/07/kamala-harris-anti-woman-misogynist-candidate/
***********************************************5 September, 2024
The WAR against OUR Past: inside the ideological project to undermine our history and collective memory
Matt Goodwin below rightly notes the decline in British patriotism and shows how that is a loss. He fails to take note of the fact that it is almost entirely the political Left that is pushing that. So to understand that you have to go down into the psychology of the Left. WHY are they so corrosive of British national identity?
There a number of reasons but a major one is that they are born gloomy. The genetic studies show a strong inherited element in political orientation and the research also shows that your happiness level is largely preset. Most of the time a person is either happy or gloomy or somewhere in between.
So the really interesting question is how the gloomy ones have gained so much influence
Most of the answer is fairly clear. We live in a broadly very sucessful society that is kinder to its people than any previous society has been. And that seems fragile to many people. They fear that it might all collapse. So when the Left come out with all their doom and gloom prophecies, They are closely attended to in case they are onto something. The global warming nonsense is an example of that
And patriotism is also an easy concern. There have been notable examples of people's patriotism being disatrously misused by politicians, notably Adolf Hitler. So anti-patriotism has emerged as a a barrier to a possibly destructive phenomenon.
But patriotism has many psychological benefits, particularly feelings of belonging and solidarity, so the attacks on it can destroy much that is beneficial to people. The gloomy Left are good at detecting possible dangers and that gets attention to them
Here’s a story you might have missed. The British people’s pride in their history has collapsed to a historic low. At least, that’s according to brand new findings from something called the British Social Attitudes survey, which has been tracking what the British think since the 1980s. Here’s what the survey found.
Over the last decade, the Brits have become much less likely to feel pride in their country’s history and achievements. And the numbers are truly striking.
Consider this. In 2013, 86% of all Brits said they were proud of Britain’s history. Today? The figure has collapsed to 64%.
And in 2013, while 62% of Brits said they would rather be a citizen of Britain than anywhere else in the world, today just 49% think this way.
What’s going on? Well, the expert class will tell you this reflects wider changes in British society and, in particular, people’s changing conceptions of who we are.
There are basically two stories of our national identity.
The first, cherished by the elite class, is of a diverse, multicultural, pro-immigration society that largely defines its identity by its celebration of diversity.
This is what we might call a ‘civic’ conception of our national identity, a thinner vision which puts the emphasis on respecting laws and welcoming others.
The second, cherished by lots of people outside the elite class, is of a proud country that has withstood all invaders since the Norman Conquest, and which enjoys a rich and unique historic and cultural legacy that needs to be cherished and preserved.
This is what we might call an ‘ethno-traditional’ of our national identity —a thicker vision which rejects racism but also puts more emphasis on our shared history, ancestry, and distinctive culture and ways of life.
Today, according to the British Social Attitudes survey, the British are gradually moving away from this second vision of who they are to embrace the first —which explains why they are less wedded to things like their history.
As the country’s population is becoming more diverse, university-educated, and as younger Zoomers from Generation-Z and Millennials are steadily replacing older Baby Boomers —with immigrants, graduates, and younger people more likely to embrace this civic vision— more and more people are viewing Britishness or Englishness in these terms, repacking their identity around universal liberal themes like celebrating diversity while downplaying their distinctive ancestry and history.
At least, this is the narrative the elite class promote, largely because it reflects how the elite class like to think about their own national identity.
But there are two problems with this.
The first, as we’ve seen through things like the rise of UKIP, Brexit, Boris Johnson, and now the Reform party, is that, actually, millions of people still think there is much more to Britishness and Englishness than a hollow celebration of ‘diversity’.
While the elite class is wants to repackage our identity around these universal themes —saying the only thing that defines us is that we celebrate diversity and multiculturalism— many other people think ‘no, hang on on a minute, there is something distinctive and unique about coming from these islands and we don’t want all this unique history and culture to be pushed aside for things that could just as easily apply to many other countries around the world’.
As I said last night on television, to say that a nation is welcoming of things like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ is fine. But it cannot be the entire basis of your identity because if the only thing that defines you is that you welcome others then it’s like saying you have no real identity of you own.
And many people in Britain and England, like many people across the West, do think they have a unique, distinctive, special identity that cannot simply be pushed aside in favour of a rather bland celebration of immigration, diversity and multiculturalism.
The second problem with this elite interpretation of who we are is that it completely ignores an alternative hypothesis for why people’s pride in their history and culture is declining —and this owes more to ideology than demographic change.
As Professor Frank Furedi argues in an important new book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History, over the last twenty years, across the West, members of the elite class have simply declared war on our past and history.
Cancel culture, Furedi argues, has now moved from focusing on the present towards imposing its narrative on how we view our past and history. The goal of radically revising if not cancelling our cultural inheritance is pursued by reorganising society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimating its ideals and achievement.
To achieve this objective, the elite class consciously erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past.
This is why they target historic symbols of our identity and Western culture more generally, as if these things constitute a clear and present danger to their wellbeing.
This is why great historical figures of Western science and philosophy – David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, among many others – are attacked and condemned for their values and behaviour, as if they are our contemporaries.
And this is why this war against our past, against our history, is relentlessly pursued in the institutions that incubate our young people, including our taxpayer-funded universities and schools. We are funding an attack on our own history, in other words.
Increasingly, as I’ve been pointing out for a while, teachers and the curriculum rely on teaching materials and dubious theories such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), which essentially encourage our children to think negatively about their own history, identity, and the West. Routinely, they’re taught there is more bad than good in our history and cultural inheritance when the very opposite is true.
The curriculum guidelines suggest the deeds of the British Empire are somehow comparable to those of Nazi Germany, while children are taught to be critical of their own history, and the history of the West, while comparable examples of imperialism and slavery in non-Western states —including ones still taking place today—are routinely downplayed or simply ignored. In effect, these guidelines seek to make our children feel ashamed about their nation’s past and, by extension, their ancestors.
At the root of this is not just the elite’s desire to repackage our identity around a universal liberal celebration of diversity and multiculturalism but, more accurately, around a conception of ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’, whereby the British and English are told to celebrate the distinctive identity, history, and culture of minorities while simultaneously being told to forget, downplay, or criticise their own distinctive history and identity, and repackage them instead around universal liberal themes.
As Furedi argues, this elite project of estranging society from its historical and cultural inheritance is proving to be remarkably successful. It is drifting out from the educational institutions and being reinforced by the creative and cultural industries, where the continual revision of our history and past is now visible in everything from Netflix to the latest Hollywood films.
Those who resist, such as by flying the flag, are condemned as ‘far-right bigots’, while icons of our identity and history, from William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, are continually demonised as the personification of ‘white supremacy’. The absurdity of this imperative to render toxic every great individual of Britain’s past is highlighted by the attempt to turn Shakespeare’s hero, Henry 5th, into a war criminal.
This deep-seated mistrust of tradition and our history also extends to the family, going so far as to warn mothers and fathers to be wary of the child rearing practices used by parents in previous times. The advice and views of grandparents is frequently attacked as irrelevant and possibly prejudicial to the development of the child by so-called ‘parenting experts’. As a result of the institutionalisation of these attitudes, children are no longer socialised into the values that were held by their grandparents, and certainly not by their more distant ancestors. As Furedi notes:
“It is through the alienation of society from its history that opponents of Western Culture seek to gain moral and political hegemony. The stakes are high in this conflict since the project of contaminating the past diminishes the capacity of society to endow people’s life with meaning. A society that becomes ashamed of its historical legacy invariably loses its way. It weakens society’s capacity to socialise children and dooms them to a state of a permanent crisis of identity. It is our responsibility to the young to ensure that they have access to the legacy of the past.”
Human-beings, he points out, are historical animals. The past lives on through us. Or, as Shakespeare reminded us through the Earl of Warwick: ‘There is a history in all men’s lives’. The possession of a sense of the past is integral to what it means to be human. If this sensibility is culturally devalued and people become desensitised to its use then, increasingly, our public life will fall under the spell of social amnesia, which is perhaps what those latest survey results are at least partly reflecting.
Ultimately, it is through our connection with the traditions of past and their cultural inheritance that people learn to understand their place in the world. Without this sense of connection our identity of being part of a wider, distinctive community and nation becomes emptied of meaning. And so, in turn, do we.
The harm that is now being done by this war on the past is all too evident in the contemporary world. And it is our young people, growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them, who are the human casualties of this war. As Winston Churchill said, ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-war-against-our-past-inside-the
**************************************************4 September, 2024
Trump vows to make electricity cheap with ‘hundreds of new power plants’ and modular nuclear reactors
Trump touted plans Thursday to reduce electricity costs by quickly approving the construction of new power plants and spurring the deployment of small modular reactors for nuclear energy — saying it would unleash an economic boom.
Trump, 78, said that more electricity would tame inflation and meet the future energy needs of artificial intelligence.
“To achieve this rapid reduction in energy costs, I will declare a national emergency to allow us to dramatically increase energy production, generation and supply, which Comrade Kamala has destroyed,” the Republican presidential nominee said at a rally in Potterville, Mich.
“Starting on day one, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors and we will slash the red tape. We will get the job done. We will create more electricity, also for these new industries that can only function with massive electricity.”
Former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt previewed the plans on a morning press call, saying, “In the future, every manufacturing plant, every data center, every semiconductor facility and assembly line will want to be built in America — because America will be the place where the cost of energy is lower than anywhere else on Earth.”
The 45th president laid out his energy vision — including tapping domestic reserves of oil and gas and easing regulation of vehicle efficiency — in a swing-state area where cars are made while slamming Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ record as vice president.
“Between soaring demand and retiring coal, we are facing a great capacity shortfall of at least 30% by 2032,” Bernhardt said. “You should ask Harris [and Tim] Walz how they are going to make up for that shortfall under their net zero vision. I submit to you they can’t.”
One new aspect of the Trump energy plan is the boost to nuclear energy, which currently makes up 18.6% of US electricity production — far behind natural gas (43.1%), and only narrowly ahead of coal (16.2%) and wind (10.2%).
Trump will “support nuclear energy production by modernizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, working to keep existing power plants open and investing in innovative small modular reactors,” Bernhardt said.
“President Trump will fully modernize the electric grid to prepare it for the next 100 years, implement rapid approvals for energy projects, and greenlight the construction of hundreds of new power plants to pave the way for an enormous growth in American wealth,” he added.
Billionaire-led nuclear boom
Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are not currently in commercial use in the United States and none are scheduled to open before 2030 — though advocates of the technology, including billionaire Bill Gates, whose company TerraPower is behind that inaugural facility in Wyoming, think they can reshape the industry.
The current timeline means that — at least as of now — no small modular reactors would be in commercial use until after a second Trump term, said Daniel Kammen, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.
“Nuclear SMR proponents will say this is the brave, bright new wave for nuclear power and these private sector operators are going to essentially do for nuclear what they seem to have done for space launches,” Kammen said.
Still, “the number of barriers in design to protect public safety that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission runs means even a massively pro-nuclear president would have a hugely difficult time stepping through those,” the prof said.
Advocates believe modular technology could pave the way to faster and cheaper deployment of nuclear power as an environmentally friendly alternative to high-emissions sources — and outgoing President Biden also has supported research into SMR use.
The major differences between conventional nuclear power plants and SMRs is the power-production capacity — with “small” facilities with cores roughly the size of an 18-wheeler truck generating less electricity.
“There are effectively SMRs operating around the world. Russia delivers nuclear-powered icebreakers to its Arctic cities and then they take the power directly off of that boat. We have nuclear aircraft carriers,” Kammen said.
“If someone really cut away legislation and regulation, you certainly could” deploy them commercially, he added — warning, however, that nuclear technology comes with significant potential risks including human operator-caused disasters.
“The technology of this size has existed for decades,” Kammen said. “These are just machines that are tailored for commercial use.”
Smaller-scale reactors would in theory allow for greater adoption — as has been the case with solar energy, which has grown to produce 3.9% of US electricity thanks in part to increased affordability of solar panels associated with higher production volume, Kammen said.
Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Institute who previously served on Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team, said the 45th president seems to be putting “more emphasis now on nuclear” than during his term of office.
“More work is going to be needed than just that [with] the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He’s also going to have to change how EPA regulates radiation exposures. So I think all that stuff is doable,” he told The Post.
Milloy posited that Republicans have warmed up to nuclear power because it could help counter Democrats on the issue of climate change.
“They want to dodge talking about climate, which I think is ridiculous,” he said. “I mean, they should beat Harris-Walz over the head with climate, especially in Pennsylvania. So they talk about energy solutions [instead],” he said.
Reversing green policies
The former president’s campaign also restated a raft of familiar pro-fossil fuel policies — including easing domestic production of oil, natural gas and coal while trashing policies intended to phase out vehicles that use gasoline and diesel fuel.
Milloy contended that one of Trump’s most significant energy proposals is his mantra of “drill baby, drill,” which he argued would “unleash the US oil and gas industry.” He also cautioned that Trump could run into roadblocks with the EPA.
“EPA is famous for its resistance that developed during the Trump administration — the first one. Those guys slow up things, sabotage them, and Trump’s going to have to appoint strong agency leaders that understand the resistance, and know how to combat the resistance,” he said.
Under the Harris-Biden administration, the federal government imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal land, axed construction of the KeyStone XL oil pipeline from Canada and forbade drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Harris, 59, has not laid out her energy policies in detail but previously supported bans on fracking and a complete phase-out of new gas-powered cars by 2035. Her aides have distanced her from both of those pledges, though the veep has yet to do so herself.
Trump has vowed to claw back at least some of the $369 billion in environmental funding included in Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which Republicans argue has contributed to inflation — which has surged 20% since Biden took office in January 2021.
“Energy isn’t part of the economy, it’s the heart of the economy, and if the energy costs increase, everything increases,” American Energy Institute CEO Jason Isaac told The Post.
Democrats have defended themselves from blame over energy prices by pointing out that domestic crude oil production hit an all-time high last year.
“Go back and look at [Energy Information Administration] projections well before the Biden administration took office,” Bernhardt said in pushing back. “What you would see is that the projections far exceeded today’s current production. And so, while production has increased, the reality is that’s actually below what would have occurred under the policies of President Trump.
“So they can take credit for missing the mark.”
*******************************************
Kamala Failed To Hide Her Biggest Election Weakness From Voters
There is a steady theme following Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign like an anchor to a boat. She will likely lose the November election if she can’t break free.
If there was anything voters could take away from Harris’s CNN interview, it was her lack of compassion. Whether it was talking about the economic woes of the middle class or her foreign policy failures, it was apparent that she couldn’t connect with people on a human level, which is one of the most important aspects of running for president.
The number one issue people talk to me about is the economy and how it affects their daily lives, especially mothers. The price of healthy foods like butter, whole milk, eggs, and good proteins is much higher than it was three years ago. It’s hard for a family to outpace the yoke of inflation. (ROOKE: Kamala’s Campaign Crossed The Line, And Now She’s Paying The Price)
Some pollsters are seeing a momentous shift among voters, like black males, who have traditionally voted for the Democrat Party, because of the pain they feel from Biden-Harris’s economic policies. Former CNN host Don Lemon shocked MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that he’s seen a large number of black male voters say the terrible economy is why they plan to vote for former President Donald Trump in November.
When Harris tells Americans that she will protect/uplift/repair the middle class, as she did on CNN, but her emotions don’t convey an understanding of how badly they are hurting, it exposes her lack of care for these people. It’s crucial for voters to see that leaders understand their plight and are willing to fight for them. Harris fails to show that understanding and begs voters to believe that even though she is currently Vice President, there is nothing she can do immediately to fix it. (How Liberal Pollsters Are Recreating The 2016 Wave Of Silent Trump Voters)
Her lack of compassion only underscores to voters that she broke it once and will do it again.
Similarly, with the Gaza war, she is attempting to thread a political needle. Hamas is holding American citizens captive, and they have been for almost a year. When the news broke that terrorists killed six hostages, one being an American, Harris tweeted and made statements claiming that she and Biden have been working tirelessly to help these people.
However, when she had a chance to talk to the media, she ran past them. She had her wired headphones on, but as she walked up her plane’s steps, she brought her phone to her ear, seemingly pretending to be on a phone call. There is no greater example of her inability to project strength and compassion than her choice to ignore the press, knowing their questions would be about the hostages and the abject failure of the Biden-Harris Administration to help them.
The point of ignoring the press, who are almost completely on her side, is that she is more interested in making sure she isn’t on camera upsetting the anti-Israel sympathizers in swing states than she is in taking a stand against the captives holding American citizens hostage. Is earning Michigan’s electoral college votes really more important to her than rescuing Americans? Because that is what it looks like to voters. (ROOKE: The Moment The RFK Campaign Realized Trump Was Right About Everything)
Unlike Trump, who has an uncanny ability to connect with middle-class and blue-collar workers, Harris seems cold and unloving. She’s never had to worry about feeding her family or fighting authoritarianism. Her inability to portray this natural human emotion is obvious to voters looking for hope at the end of the last three years of hardship. Having her surrogates (Gov. Tim Walz, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, etc.) won’t be enough. Harris has to convey that compassion, or voters will continue to flock to Trump.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/03/rooke-kamala-weakness-honeymoon/
**************************************************3 September, 2024
Why AI ‘misinformation’ algorithms and research are mostly expensive garbage
If ever there was a case of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ then this is it.
And, ultimately it has all been driven by the objective of censoring information that does not fit the politically correct narrative.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is just one of many stories which were deemed by the Main Stream Media (and most academics) to be ‘misinformation‘ but which were subsequently revealed as true.
Indeed Mark Zukerberg has now admitted that Facebook (Meta), along with the other big tech companies, were pressured into censoring the story before the 2020 US election and also subsequently pressured by the Biden/Harris administration to censor stories about Covid which were wrongly classified as misinformation.
The problem is that the same kind of people who decided what was and was not misinformation (generally people on the political Left) were also the ones who were funded to produce AI algorithms to ‘learn’:
a) which people were ‘spreaders of misinformation’; and
b) what new claims were ‘misinformation’.
Between 2016 and 2022, I attended many research seminars in the UK on using AI and Machine Learning to ‘combat misinformation and disinfomation’.
From 2020, the example of Hunter Biden’s laptop was often used as a key ‘learning’ example, so algorithms classified it as ‘misinformation’ with subclassifications like ‘Russian propaganda’ or ‘conspiracy theory’.
Moreover, every presentation I attended invariably started with (and was dominated by) examples of ‘misinformation’ that were claimed to be based on “Trump lies” such as those among what the Washington Post claimed were the “30,573 false or misleading claims made by Trump over 4 years”.
But many of these supposed false or misleading claims were already known to be true to anybody outside of the Guardian/NYT/Washington Post reading bubble.
For example, they claimed that Trump said “Neo-Nazis and white supremacists were very fine people” and that anybody denying was pushing misinformation, whereas even the far Left-leaning Snopes had debunked that in 2017.
Similarly, they claimed “evidence that Biden had dementia” or that “Biden liked to smell the hair of young girls” was misinformation despite multiple videos showing exactly that – so, don’t believe your lying eyes; indeed as recently as one week before Biden’s dementia could no longer been hidden during his live Presidential debate performance, the mainstream media were adamant that such videos were misinformation ‘cheap tricks’.
But the academics presenting these Trump, Biden, and other political, examples ridiculed anybody who dared question the reliability of the self-appointed oracles who determined what was and was not misinformation. At one major conference taking place on zoom I posted in the chat:
“Is anybody who does not hate Trump welcome in this meeting”. The answer was “No. Trump supporters are not welcome and if you are one you should leave now”.
Sadly, most academics do not believe in freedom of thought, let alone freedom of expression when it comes to any views that challenge the ‘progressive’ narrative on anything.
In addition to the Biden and Trump related ‘misinformation’ stories which turned out to be true, there were also multiple examples of covid related stories (such as those claiming very low fatality rates and lack of effectiveness and safety of the vaccines) classified as misinformation that also turned out to be true.
In all these cases anybody pushing these stories was classified as a ‘spreader of misinformation’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ etc. And it is these kinds of assumptions which drive how the AI ‘misinformation’ algorithms that were developed and implemented by organisations like Facebook and Twitter worked.
Let me give a simplified example The algorithms generally start with a database of statements which are pre-classified as either ‘misinformation’ (even though many of which turned out to be true), or ‘not misinformation’ (even though many of which turned out to be false). For example, the following were classified as misinformation:
“Hunter Biden left a laptop with evidence of his criminal behaviour in a repair shop”
“The covid vaccines can cause serious injury and death”
The converse of any statement classified as ‘misinformation’ was classified as ‘not misinformation’.
A subset of these statements are used to “train” the algorithm and others to “test” the algorithm.
So, suppose the laptop statement is one of those used to train the algorithm and the vaccine statement is one of those used to test the algorithm.
Then, because the laptop satement is classified as misinformation, the algorithm learns that people who repost or like a tweet with the laptop statement are ‘misinformation spreaders’. Based on other posts these people make, the algorithm might additionally classify them as, for example, ‘far right’.
The algorithm is likely to find that some people already classified as ‘far right’ or ‘misinformation spreader’ – or people they are connected to – also post a statement like “The covid vaccines can cause serious injury and death”.
In that case the algorithm will have ‘learnt’ that this statement is most likely misinformation. And, hey presto, since it gives the ‘correct’ classification to the ‘test’ statement, the algorithm is ‘validated’.
Moreover, when presented with a new test statement such as “The covid vaccines do not stop infection from covid” (which was also pre-classified as ‘misinformation’) the algorithm will also ‘correctly learn’ that this is ‘misinformation’ because it has already ‘learnt’ that the statement.
“The covid vaccines can cause serious injury and death” is misinformation and that people who claimed the latter statement- or people connected with them – also claimed the former statement.
The way I have outlined how the AI process is designed to detect ‘misinformation’, is also the way that ‘world leading misinformation experts’ set up their experiment to “profile” the “personality type” that is susceptible to misinformation.
The same methods are also now used to profile and monitor people that the academic ‘experts’ claim are ‘far right’ or racist.
Hence, an enormous amount of research was (and is still) spent on developing ‘clever’ algorithms which simply censor the truth online or promote lies. Much of the funding for this research is justified on the grounds that ‘misinformation’ is now one of the greatest threats to international security.
Indeed, in Jan 2024 the Word Economic Forum declared that “misinformation and disinformation were the biggest short term global risks”.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also declared that “misinformation and disinformation are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change”. In the UK alone, the Government has provided many hundreds of millions of pounds of funding to numerous University research labs working on misinformation.
In March 2024 the Turing Institute alone (which has several dedicated teams working on this and closely related areas) was awarded £100 million of extra Government funding – it had already received some £700 million since its inception in 2015.
Somewhat ironically, the UK HM Government 2023 National Risk Register includes as a chronic risk:
“artificial intelligence (AI). Advances in AI systems and their capabilities have a number of implications spanning chronic and acute risks; for example, it could cause an increase in harmful misinformation and disinformation”
Yet it continues to prioritise research funding in AI to combat this increased risk of ‘harmful misinformation and disinformation’!
As Mike Benz has made clear in his recent work and interviews (backed up with detailed evidence), almost all of the funding for the Universities/research institutes world wide doing this kind of work, along with the ‘fact checkers’ that use it, comes from the US State Dept, NATO and the British Foreign Office who, in the wake of the Brexit vote and Trump election in 2016, were determined to stop the rise of ‘populism’ everywhere.
It is this objective which has driven the mad AI race to censor the internet.
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Harris’s empty words an insult to US voters and democracy
Did you see that interview with Kamala Harris on CNN? Wasn’t it amazing?
As things stand, Harris, and her vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz, are marginally ahead in the presidential race. If the polls are accurate, and the election were held today, she’d probably be president. On the basis of the epic, fatuous emptiness of her first major television interview, this is a potentially disastrous development.
This column is no unqualified admirer of Donald Trump. America has presented itself with a terrible choice. But on the basis of that CNN interview, it stands ready to elect one of the most spectacularly incompetent and unqualified candidates in its history.
Of course, we must be careful about polls. Trump tends to outperform his poll numbers on election day. So it’s possible that even with the current opinion poll numbers, Trump could win.
The other paradox is that Trump leads Harris over who can better manage most of the key issues, but Harris leads Trump overall in the polls. In other words, a lot of people think Trump can do the job, but don’t like him much.
People are still unconvinced that Harris can do the job, but the Democrat machine, running a Hollywood movie star celebrity image promotion job, has marketed her as a likeable and normal American.
The CNN interview was unintentionally revealing. Harris, in striking contrast to professional politicians of the past such as Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, has avoided doing any unscripted interviews or live exchanges on camera. No one suggests she’s suffering cognitive decline like Joe Biden, but she is unbelievably hopeless at explaining her policies, or even just talking in sensible English about policy issues.
As Vice-President, she did a disastrous TV interview early in the life of the Biden administration, in which the interviewer was mean enough to ask some polite but modestly insistent questions about her performance in trying to clean up the illegal immigration disaster on the Mexican border.
She made such a mess of it that she virtually went into hiding afterwards, and was never again given primary responsibility for any serious issue by the Biden administration.
But back to the CNN show. The journalist, Dana Bash, did ask some of the obvious and mildly tough questions, but when Harris didn’t answer Bash didn’t press the matter. Instead there was a suffocating atmosphere of glutinous fluff.
Even on the softest possible questions, Harris had the greatest difficulty constructing a normal English language sentence that actually related to the question.
Bash asked Harris what she would do on day one of her presidency and got this reply: “Well, there are a number of things. I will tell you first and foremost one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class. When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward in a way that generations of Americans have been fuelled by – by hope and optimism.”
There followed another similar paragraph of mind-deadening word confetti about how Trump had caused divisions.
Bash was polite, but still no clearer on what Harris planned for day one, which is one the absolutely compulsory cliche questions of all American presidential campaigns. So she tried again. Day one?
Harris replied: “Day one, it’s gonna be about one, implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy. I’ve already laid out a number of proposals in that regard, which include what we’re gonna do to bring down the cost of everyday goods, what we’re gonna do to invest in America’s small businesses, what we’re gonna do to invest in families.”
Harris seems like the fictional portrayal of Sara Palin in the movie, Game Change. In that film her handlers couldn’t get Palin to fully grasp certain policy issues, so instead they got her to learn by rote a series of topic-specific answers.
It’s tempting to think Harris has done something similar, although it’s hard to believe anyone would actually write, and the get someone else to memorise, such content-free, syntax-mangling, meandering, pointless word assemblages as Harris uttered.
When later in the interview Harris was asked about the causes of inflation, the best she could come up with was alleged “price gouging” by greedy corporations. There was no mention of the budget deficit approaching $US2 trillion, more than 6 per cent of GDP. Nor of the vast regulatory complexity, and accompanying cost, the Biden administration has added to business.
Bash gently asked Harris why she had reversed herself on her passionate opposition, as recently as 2019, to fracking. She got no answer so asked again.
Harris replied: “Well, let’s be clear. My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far.”
George Orwell could not have produced a more exquisite newspeak parody, the object of which is to give the appearance of substance to pure wind.
Consider one more immortal Harrisism, as to her radical policy reversals as she, temporarily at least, abandons her ultra-liberal past for a more centrist presentation for the election: “Dana, I think the – the – most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective is my values have not changed. You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed and I have worked on it that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
There were also some wonderfully brazen straight-out lies. Did Biden offer to endorse you in the phone call when he told you he was standing down? Harris: “Well, my first thought was not about me, to be honest.”
Walz was if anything worse than Harris. Bash asked him about several blatant lies he’s told, for example claiming he carried weapons in battle whereas during his service in the National Guard he was never deployed anywhere near a battle zone. He responded, Prince Andrew-like, by praising his own exemplary honesty.
CNN did the right thing asking these questions. But Bash responded to the non-answers as if she’d heard a masterful declamation from Cicero. CNN certainly decided not to make an issue of lies or evasions.
Harris’s handlers are hoping she can be anything any voter wants, that she can win just by not being Trump.
That’s partly why they won’t define her program or let her define herself. But refusing to outline any policies, refusing to engage in any serious debate, that’s an insult to democracy. In her own way, Harris embodies the serious, hopefully temporary, decline of America’s political culture.
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2 September, 2024
Elon Musk Leads Parade of Tech Titans Boosting Trump as the True ‘Freedom Candidate’
A shocking partisan switch is underway in the stratosphere of the tech titans: The industry known for its wokeness is betting big bucks on a Republican.
Last month former President Donald Trump gave a thumbs up to the notion of teaming up with billionaire innovator Elon Musk if he wins in November. Hours later, Musk posted a message on X: “I am willing to serve.”
Elon Musk for commerce secretary? Or perhaps for the newly created position of free speech czar?
Whether or not Musk actually joins a Trump administration—Trump himself said Sunday that the mogul is likely too busy to do so but could “consult”—his bold steps to back the Republican signal a turnaround.
Musk voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. Yet last month he launched a pro-Trump super PAC, which he and several other tech moguls are funding—even though Trump would likely remove federal subsidies for electric vehicles, a major Musk industry, if he wins a second term.
Investor and “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban called the phenomenon of tech bosses boosting Trump “insane.”
Not really: While Democrats strove mightily last week to push “freedom” as the theme of their convention, tech leaders are betting that freedom of speech, freedom to innovate and freedom from crushing government regulations and confiscatory taxes are more likely in a Trump reign than in a Kamala Harris administration.
Among those Silicon Valley heavyweights is Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.
“I would say that I trust the future of this country more under the leadership of Trump … than I do of the Harrises,” Shanahan said last week as Kennedy weighed his decision to back Trump in the race.
Harris’ economic plans, Shanahan warned—”particularly her flawed ideas about price caps on food”—echo “the very policies that caused the famine my family suffered through in Mao’s Communist China.”
The Republican National Committee’s platform, dictated largely by Trump himself, pledges lower taxes and deregulation, and describes innovators as national treasures.
In contrast, the Democrats’ 2024 platform vilifies businesses as greedy profiteers who don’t pay “their fair share” and proposes hiking corporate taxes to 28% and raising taxes on capital gains.
Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said in December that it would decide which presidential ticket to support based on one issue: “If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.” The firm called “bad government policies” the No. 1 threat to their industry.
Trump has expressed his enthusiasm for new technologies, even promising to “make America first in AI.”
By July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the investment firm’s principals, had changed sides and endorsed Trump, saying the Republican will reduce regulation and lower taxes.
When Trump chose running mate J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist with Silicon Valley experience, tech entrepreneurs applauded.
PayPal founder David Sacks is throwing his support to Trump and even spoke at the Republican National Convention. Palantir Technologies cofounder Joe Lonsdale and cryptocurrency kings Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are donating to Musk’s America PAC to back Trump.
Of course, tech is an industry like any other, concerned with what government can do to damage the business environment.
Expect more tech leaders to change sides if Harris and running mate Tim Walz roll out policy proposals as misguided as those we’ve seen so far, like price controls.
Big tech reacts to bad economic policies at every level, not just federal.
The same political metamorphosis bringing tech figures to Trump is also causing thousands of firms to flee California’s high taxes and overbearing regulations, and relocate to Texas. They’re trading woke for business-friendly.
Austin, the state capital, has become a tech hub dubbed Silicon Hills. Musk recently moved his company SpaceX to Texas and announced that X’s headquarters will soon follow.
Yet Musk is more than a Silicon Valley titan—he is also a crusader for free speech.
Last month he stared down a European Union bureaucrat who objected that Musk’s uncensored two-hour conversation with Trump on X could result in “disinformation.”
“Take a big step back,” Musk responded via a cheeky meme, after blasting the bureaucrat for his “alarming disregard for freedom of expression,” as a letter from several free speech groups put it.
Musk recently closed X in Brazil rather than comply with government censors there. X is suspended in Venezuela for refusing to take down posts challenging dictator Nicolas Maduro’s phony victory claims.
Ending government censorship is a top Republican priority. The Biden-Harris administration has used agencies from the FBI to the Department of Health and Human Services to pressure social media to do the administration’s bidding. The RNC platform pledges that federal interference will stop.
Musk wants “to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” naming meritocracy and free speech among the core ideas his America PAC is pushing.
They’re not on Harris’ agenda—more reasons tech money is moving to Trump.
You don’t need AI to figure that out.
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Food Profit Margins Shrink, But Harris Blames Them for Rising Grocery Bills
Rising grocery costs continue to put the squeeze on families. Overall, the cost of a trip to fill the pantry rose nearly 22 percent since the beginning of 2021. Many specific staples rose far more—eggs are up 110 percent, flour up 29 percent, orange juice up 82 percent. A family of four spending $1000 per month just three and a half years is spending an additional $2,640 annually for this same shopping list.
Unfortunately, Vice President Harris misdiagnosed the source of the problem as “bad actors” seeing their “highest profits in two decades.” She blames the initial surge in food prices on supply chain issues during the pandemic—certainly a major contribution to the shortages and price increases on many items early in the pandemic.
However, Harris mixes this truth with falsehood by claiming businesses are now pocketing the savings after these supply-chain issues have subsided. Her proposed solution—“the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food”—will compound the misery.
First, the faulty diagnosis. A look at the data easily counters this.
An insightful way of analyzing whether price increases are due to “gouging” is to focus on the variable production costs of the goods sold plus the selling, general, and administrative expenses. Tyson Foods—the world’s largest chicken, beef, and pork processor—saw its margin drop from 8.4 percent in 2020 to just 1.1 percent last year. Kraft Heinz and General Mills—food processors with combined revenue nearly equal to Tyson Foods, suffered similar results. Kraft Heinz’s margin declined from 21.4 percent to 20.2 percent. General Mills’s shrank from 17.8 percent to 16.8 percent. Far from “gouging,” these industry leaders are failing to fully pass along the entirety of their own cost surges to consumers. Expenses relative to sales increased during the past three and a half years of elevated inflation.
After accounting for all expenses—including extraordinary items, taxes, and interest—margins are even tighter. Notably, Tyson Foods experienced a net profit margin last year of NEGATIVE 1.23 percent. Kraft Heinz realized a 10.72 percent net profit margin last year, and General Mills a 12.91 percent margin.
What about industry-wide? Profit margins are shrinking as food manufacturing costs rose 28.4 percent since January 2020, exceeding the 26.3 percent retail price hikes on food items. Grocery store profit margins sank to 1.6 percent in 2023, the third consecutive year of decline after peaking at 3.0 percent in 2020.
In other words, grocer profit on $100 of sales is just $1.60. Profit margins contracted as overall food inflation totaled 20.6 percent in those three years. The biggest grocers have experienced this margin crunch. The Kroger Co.—the nation’s largest traditional supermarket—eked out an operating margin of 1.93 percent this past year, a margin lower now than it was pre-pandemic. These trends are the opposite of gouging.
History provides endless proof that prices set by governments under the market price results in shortages. Demand expands as supply shrinks. What good is a lower price if the shelves become empty?
Venezuela, Cuba, and the Soviet Union provide ample examples of the dangers of price controls. But the United States embarked on its own failed experiment just five decades ago. In August 1971, President Nixon ordered an initial 90-day freeze on prices and labor, with future price increases to be subject to federal approval. The proposal initially proved wildly popular, with 75 percent public support and a landslide re-election the following year. President Nixon even ordered an IRS audit on companies breaching the ceiling.
Ultimately, the program ended in disaster. As explained by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, “Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.” In April 1974, the administration dismantled most of the program.
Importantly, the inflation of the early 1970s resulted largely from easy money. From the beginning of 1970 through the demise of the price-fixing program in April 1974, the M2 money supply expanded by 48 percent. In less than four years, prices rose by nearly 27 percent. In other words, prices jumped in fewer than five years by an amount equivalent to that of the entire prior decade!
Does this sound familiar? It should. The inflationary surge of the post-COVID era is largely a direct result of the explosion of government spending beginning in 2020. The Federal Reserve financed much of this spending by ginning up its digital printing presses to purchase government bonds alongside a myriad of other assets—from mortgage-backed securities to corporate debt.
The flood of new money coursed through the economy. The M2 money supply swelled by 40 percent in just two years. More dollars chasing goods and services ultimately resulted in dramatic price hikes.
Harris appears to have forgotten the important lessons from this episode. Based on her insistence that price gouging is responsible for high grocery prices—when it clearly is not—the Vice President’s proposal would more likely function as a price freeze or command pricing. As such, the existence of state laws currently prohibiting dramatic price increases during emergencies should not assuage concerns about Harris’s proposal. Of course, even these state laws may result in the unintended consequence of shortages—but these temporary interventions in the market are rarely activated.
With deficits looming even larger in the years ahead, the threat that the central bank will finance this spending with another bond purchasing spree only increases. The food production industry is not immune from the ravages of this reckless monetary policy: the spiral of rising labor costs, insurance, and equipment. In addition, the sector is particularly sensitive to the assault on affordable fuel vital to the cultivation and transportation of food.
It’s time political leaders admit their own culpability in the shrinking purchasing power of the dollar at the grocery store. Blaming painful price increases on the very entities responsible for the most bountiful, readily accessible supply of sustenance in human history is woefully misleading. Imposing price controls is a demagogic solution harmful to farmers, processors, grocers, and families.
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1 September, 2024
Kamala: $5 Trillion in New Taxes
Kamala Harris’ economic plan is taking shape, starting with $5 trillion in new taxes—because Washington clearly does not have enough money to spend
In the past fortnight alone, Harris has promised to hike taxes on small businesses to 39.6% and hike taxes on capital gains and dividends to a top rate of 44.6%—the highest in history, even beating the communist-adjacent Jimmy Carter.
Since taxing half your life savings doesn’t come close to keeping Washington fed, she also wants to hike the corporate rate by a third to 28%. That would take us from one of the best places in the world to do business to one of the worst. We’d be worse than China, Canada, Britain, Russia, even the European Union.
A company would literally make money moving to Canada. And for so-called strategic sectors, our tax rate would be double the rate in China.
Note that workers are the ones who actually pay corporate income tax. A Tax Foundation study found that they pay around 70% of them in the form of lower wages. The rest is paid by shareholders in lower retirement returns and customers in higher prices. Yes, the same high prices she’s blaming on “price gouging.”
The fun doesn’t stop there.
Harris is also calling for a second death tax, something called “step-up basis” that would treat death as a taxable event. So, not only would the family business or farm have to pay estate taxes when it’s passed on, it would be taxed as if all the assets were sold, with up to 44.6% going to the government on top of the death tax.
Finally, the big one: Harris’ handlers are pushing for something we’ve never taxed in this country: unrealized gains. As in a bureaucrat pretends you sold all your stock and the family farm when you didn’t and sends you a bill anyway.
Like all new taxes, this one is being sold as only hitting the rich, but in reality, it will hit family businesses and farms. Moreover, I mentioned in a recent video how the income tax itself started by only hitting the top 1% at a top rate of 7%—and yet here we are today, with more tax returns than people in this country and a top rate of—if Harris gets her way—44.6%.
Incidentally, Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains by a factor of 3 to 1. Seventy-six percent of independents oppose it.
It’s also worth noting Europeans have tried this kind of wealth tax over and over, and every time, it’s failed. The actual rich just move their money and hire better tax lawyers, while small business gets wiped out. Norway, for example, expected to collect $150 million per year from its wealth tax, but instead $54 billion fled the country, taking $600 million of taxes with it.
So, what’s next?
Barely a month into Harris’ presidential candidacy, she’s already far to the left of even President Joe Biden. And keep in mind, this is before the election, when they try not to sound crazy.
We can only imagine what’s coming after the election.
Like drinking radiator coolant, government spending always tastes sweet in the beginning. The stimulus checks, the trillion dollars for green energy, and this week’s war are all painless blips on a debt chart.
Then comes the payback: First, the inflation; then, the taxes that amount to wholesale confiscation of your retirement, of a financial future for the young—all while gutting what’s left of the productive economy.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/28/kamala-trillion-new-taxes/
********************************************************CNN’s Softball Interview of Kamala Harris
Vice President Kamala Harris’ very first interview of her campaign aired on CNN Thursday night.
We waited a month and a half for this and Harris’ much anticipated debut ended up containing barely more substance than the policy section of her website. (Don’t search too long for that section; it doesn’t exist.)
The interview began with a glowing montage resembling a movie trailer, settled in with a few tough questions, and ended with a whole lot of meaningless fluff. There were a few word salads mixed in for flavor.
CNN anchor Dana Bash did press Harris on a handful of her long list of flip flops.
She asked Harris why she changed her policy on fracking. In 2019, Harris said that she was in favor of banning fracking. Here she is saying so.
Now she says she no longer backs the ban on fracking. What changed?
Harris couldn’t articulate a particular reason. She said that climate change is real and that the current administration is doing a good job of hitting climate goals, so she won’t do it.
“What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she said.
The vice president was also asked about the record illegal border crossings since she and President Joe Biden ascended to the White House. Bash noted that she was tasked with solving the “root causes” of illegal immigration from Central America.
This is when Harris was the border czar, a phrase the media has desperately attempted to erase from history.
Harris answered that what she did to address the root causes of illegal immigration has “resulted in a number of benefits, including historic investments by American businesses in that region. The number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we’ve began that work.”
She then said it was actually former President Donald Trump who was against border security and that she and Biden were all for the Senate border bill that failed to pass in February.
That bill would have done little to stop the flow of illegal immigration and was largely stuffed with funding for the war in Ukraine to boot.
Bash later followed up with a softball question—asked in the form of a wink, wink answer—about how voters should respond to her shifting sands policy positions.
“How should voters look at some of the changes you’ve made that you explained some of here in your policy?” Bash asked before giving Harris multiple-choice options to respond with. “Because you’ve had more experience now and you have learned more about the information? Is it running for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you say now is going to be your policy moving forward?”
Harris fumbled her response anyway with a meandering non-answer but insisted that her values have stayed the same. Take a listen.
Ah, so we’re supposed to believe that while Harris’ policy positions have largely changed in just a few years, her principles remain timeless. But are those values left-wing, moderate, populist, or what? She didn’t explain.
Those were the high points of the interview. There’s little else to say about the policy substance. I suggest you read my colleague Virginia Allen’s fact check of the handful of substantial questions Harris was asked.
Harris notably brought her dad, I mean her running mate Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., along with her. He didn’t do much and just kind of sat there like a chaperone.
Walz was asked a question about his alleged stolen valor and why he made false statements about being a war veteran.
“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed actually in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.
The Minnesota governor didn’t really answer. Walz just said that he’s proud of his service, and that he has poor grammar.
After that there really isn’t much to tell in this edited, 27-minute performance.
Harris was asked about the day Biden dropped out of the race which gave her the chance to tell a whimsical story about puzzles and making bacon when she got the phone call. Walz and Harris were questioned about what enchanted them about the DNC. And Harris was given a moment to talk about a picture of her niece watching her accept the nomination.
These are clearly the issues voters care about.
What we learned from this is that the Harris campaign clearly intends to test the outer limits of how much the media and this regime can simply manufacture a presidency.
Harris’ performance Thursday night wasn’t awful. It was just flat and shallow. She gave cookie cutter, not particularly clarifying. answers to serious questions about governing philosophy.
And it’s hard to say that the American people learned much at all other than that Harris held some policies, then she didn’t, she thinks Biden is a great and wonderful president, but she’s new and fresh.
The question Harris was never really asked and generally didn’t answer was this: Why should she be the president? What does she think she will bring to the White House that would make her an effective commander-in-chief? Why should we think she will be anything more than a lifeless caretaker president like her predecessor?
Harris may be more lucid than Biden at this point, but mere lucidity shouldn’t be the only qualification to be president.
The closest Harris got to answering this question of why she should be president is when she said in her talk about her niece, “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans.”
That’s not a bad answer for someone running to be class president, but doesn’t really explain to the American people why a candidate who simply got dropped into this race at the last second should become the leader of the free world.
CNN asked a handful of tough questions, but failed to follow up, and left the American people without answers about what Harris actually stands for.
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UK: Here’s an opinion poll you might have missed.
A few days ago, YouGov asked British people whether they would support or oppose increasing deportations of illegal migrants. The results speak for themselves.
More than two-thirds of the country, 67%, would support increasing deportations, rising to 92% among Conservatives and 96% among Reformers.
It’s a reminder of how ordinary people are thinking and feeling, and how the ‘pro-immigration position’ is routinely only represented by 15-20%.
Why am I showing you this?
Because this issue also lies at the heart of something else in British politics that is about to heat up dramatically: the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party, a party that at the general election last month was very nearly destroyed.
Put simply, if there’s one issue more than any other that will determine whether the Conservative Party comes off life support and recovers then it is immigration.
This was the primary reason why millions of disillusioned conservatives abandoned the party for Nigel Farage and Reform’s tougher measures, and has since become the most important issue for ALL people in the country, eclipsing the economy.
And make no mistake: this is also the most important leadership election in the modern history of the Conservative Party.
Why? Because if they get this right they could, perhaps, fend off Nigel Farage and Reform. But if they get this wrong then they will continue their death spiral.
If the Tories elect somebody who is credible and competent on immigration then they might at least stand a chance of survival; but if they elect somebody who is weak and deferential to the status-quo then they will essentially be creating the biggest opening for Nigel Farage that the leader of Reform has ever had.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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