Have I "radicalised"?

Matt Goodwin describes well below the way a half-mad Leftist elite have taken control of the national discourse in Britain -- to a point where policies and procedures very harmful to the average Briton have been put in place.

A major omisssion from what Matt says below, however, is that he fails to take account of the fact that it is only one half of the elite that is Leftist. At election time, at least half of people in elite occupations vote conservative. As ever, it is minorities and the poor who are the support-base of the Left, not the elite as a whole.

So the deeper question about elite influence is how the LEFTIST elite have gained so much power in the media, in the educational system and to some extent in big business?

An answer is complacency. The destructive Leftist policies all have justifications as being kind and caring. And those who are in a position to see the full picture tend to think that the polices sound good so may well spring from real good intentions and should therefore not be opposed. So we badly need writers such as Matt to alert us to how much damage is being done by the ideas of the Leftist elite

“What happened to you, Matt? When did you change your views? When did you become right-wing? When did you become … radical?”

These are questions I’m asked a lot, usually by disgruntled members of the elite class —an assortment of left-wing academics, journalists, and think-tankers I worked with more than a decade ago.

And while this is deliberate, a concerted strategy to try and discredit anybody who challenges the elite consensus, these questions do need answering for two reasons.

First, because I feel an enormous sense of responsibility and obligation to be as truthful as possible to you, my readers and supporters.

And, second, because as one of my favourite writers, Andrew Sullivan, once wrote, this dynamic should really be the other way round.

It’s not me who has radicalised. It’s the elite class.

Today, we are simply living through the greatest radicalisation of the ruling class in Western democracies since at least the 1960s, if not for more than a century.

What do I mean by this?

Well, let’s start with my own views.

I’ve certainly made no secret of the fact that, over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve become more critical of things like mass, uncontrolled immigration.

Why? Because research shows it creates low-trust societies that are more divided, polarised, segregated, less supportive of welfare, and more violent.

I was recently in Sweden, for example, where I did not meet anybody on the left or right who felt their country’s experiment with mass immigration has been a success.

Let me say that again.

I was in Sweden —notoriously liberal, tolerant Sweden— and I could not find a single soul who thought that mass immigration had made their country a nice place to live.

I’ve also become more critical not of multi-ethnic societies per se but rather the state policy of multiculturalism, which encourages different ethnic and religious groups to live separate ‘parallel lives’, rather than integrate into a wider, shared community.

And I’m not alone in this.

More than a decade ago, leaders from across the spectrum —David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair— could all say much the same, and in public.

What else do I think?

I reject anti-Muslim prejudice much like I reject anti-Semitism and racism.

But I do have strong and growing concerns about the capacity and willingness of Islam to integrate into West nations, to respect our rule of law, the rights of women and same-sex couples, and to root out violent Islamism among its ranks.

My critics on the left, who have spent much of the last decade inflating terms like “Islamophobia”, will say this is irrational.

But I would say it’s entirely rational after watching violent Islamists blow up 52 of their fellow citizens on London’s Tube and buses, murder British children at a pop concert, execute British soldier Lee Rigby, police officer Keith Palmer, and Member of Parliament Sir David Amess, attempt to blow up a women’s hospital in Liverpool, and stab and murder dozens of other innocents, like pensioner Terence Carney.

Not to mention my confusion about why so few prominent British Muslims, Imams, and others, for years, failed to call out the industrial-scale rape of young white girls at the hands of Pakistani Muslim gangs in dozens of English cities, and when a few brave souls did call this out much of the left said nothing or dismissed them as ‘racist’.

I also believe passionately in free speech but now worry it’s being undermined by a creeping groupthink, political correctness, and cancel culture —a point The Economist, among many others, has also made in recent years.

I think we’re too soft on criminals and would like to see tougher sentencing, especially for repeat offenders who make the lives of their fellow residents and communities miserable and intolerable because we no longer put them where they belong: prison.

I believe that the family, shaped by my own experience of having been raised by divorced parents, is the most important unit in society, that children who are raised by two parents routinely do better in life than those who are not.

I believe that the nation-state is an incredibly powerful source of belonging, pride, and status for most people, that Western nations got more things right than wrong in their history, and that public institutions, especially schools and universities, should ensure this remarkable cultural inheritance is passed down to our children.

And when it comes to economics, I think capitalism is the most successful economic system we’ve managed to create but also think that global corporations, big business and crony capitalists routinely look for ways to exploit workers.

Like many other members of my generation, Gen-X, I came of age during the 1990s and the 2000s, watching globalisation disproportionately damage the working-class in Western economies and then lived through the Global Financial Crash, with few of those responsible for ruining economies and people’s lives facing any consequences.

These views are not extreme. Nor are they particularly radical.

They basically put me where the average voter is. Across the West, all these views are shared by millions, and usually majorities, of ordinary people.

But now look at the elite class.

Look at the university graduates from the elite institutions, who work in financially secure if not well-paid professional jobs, who live in one of the big cities, the affluent commuter suburbs, and the university towns, whose parents also belong to this class, whose marriages and social networks are likewise filled with people from this class, who share the same backgrounds, values, and political loyalties, and who all lean strongly to the political and cultural left.

They’ve radicalised.

Over the last fifteen years, they’ve swung even more sharply to the left, leaving a large number of people scratching their heads, asking themselves the same question.

What the hell happened to the ruling class, to the people who dominate the most important and influential institutions in my country, who claim to speak on my behalf?

Writing on his deathbed in the early 1990s, the academic Christopher Lasch once said that the revolt that was about to commence in the West would not see the masses revolting against elites but elites revolting against the masses.

And he was right; this is exactly what is now happening around us.

Increasingly, our societies are being radically reshaped around the values, beliefs, tastes, and priorities of a radicalising minority elite, rather than the wider majority.

Just look at where the elite class is today compared to where it was, say, ten or fifteen years ago, and compared to where many ordinary people, like me, still are today.

While large majorities of people in the West, like me, think mass, uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable and damaging Western economies, culture, and ways of life, today’s elite class, as we saw in its reaction to things like Europe’s refugee crisis, Brexit, Trump, and the recent immigration protests in the UK, has now radicalised to such an extent that it views any criticism of this policy, any criticism at all, as tantamount to ‘racism’ and ‘hate’.

Whereas only a few years ago, the likes of Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Blair could talk openly about the failure of state multiculturalism, triggering a useful debate, today’s elite class, including even Conservatives, could not even handle the likes of Suella Braverman making the very same point without having a complete nervous breakdown and catastrophising about the possible return of fascism.

Similarly, whereas in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities on 9/11 and 7/7 we could just about have a reasonable debate about how best to integrate newcomers, prevent Islamist terror, and encourage ‘community cohesion’, however flawed those ideas were, today, after things like the murder of children at an Ariana Grande pop concert and the murder of Sir David Amess, the elite class has a total meltdown and insists that we either hold hands and sing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ or have a completely irrelevant debate about ‘online safety’ and how to ‘be nice’ on social media.

Compare and contrast, too, the reaction to urban disturbances in England’s northern towns, in 2001, with the reaction to the immigration protests this year. Whereas only twenty years ago, the elite class was capable of talking openly about the underlying cause, the fact minority (mainly Muslim) communities were living ‘parallel lives’, and that our model of multiculturalism was very clearly failing, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it is incapable to talking about the cause at all.

So far, weeks on from the rioting and protests, for example, the elite class has still said nothing at all about the root cause of the immigration protests, preferring instead to view them simply and narrowly through the prism of criminality while deriding much of the rest of the country as ‘far-right thugs’ and desperately searching for new ways to curtail free speech and shut down any debate. Today’s elite class, in other words, has radicalised to such an extent it is now completely incapable of even leading a national debate that might give voice to views which challenge the elite consensus.

While many people in the West, meanwhile, like me, used to think that a level of net migration of 150,000 a year was too high —a view, by the way, shared by much of the elite class as recently as fifteen years ago— today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that whether on the right or left it now has no problem at all with pushing this number to an eye-watering 700,000 a year while continuously breaking manifesto promises to lower the overall number. The elite class, in short, has morphed from accepting it made mistakes on this issue to now just lying to the British people.

In the 2000s, New Labour politicians could talk openly and honestly about the urgent need to regain control of the borders and swiftly remove illegal migrants from the country; but today, in sharp contrast, the elite class is falling over itself to grant amnesty to nearly 100,000 illegal migrants while branding anybody who talks about ‘stopping the boats’ as ‘far-right’ and blaming them for the outbreak of rioting.

I mean, seriously, am I supposed to be the person who has radicalised here?

While many people in the West, like me, think free speech should be protected and promoted, today’s elite class, as we see through the spread of a chilling cancel culture, an oppressive political correctness, and online mobbings of anybody who dissents on social media, is routinely willing to sacrifice free speech on the altar of ‘social justice’ and protecting minorities from what it calls ‘emotional harm’. Routinely, major surveys now find that the left-leaning elites who dominate universities and other public institutions are the most willing of all to say they’d compromise on free speech and free expression if it means greater protection for minority groups, which helps to explain why they are so eager to shut down voices like mine.

While many people in the West, like me, still think Western liberal societies should be organised around individual rights, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that it actively subordinates individual rights behind people’s fixed group identities. The only thing that really matters to today’s elite class, which is now falling over itself to impose ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ policies on pretty much every institution and government department, is not our individual achievements and character but merely what fixed identity group we belong to. Do we belong to one of the morally superior ‘oppressed’ racial, sexual, or gender minority groups? Or do we belong to the morally inferior ‘oppressor’ majority group, which should be treated with suspicion, if not contempt? Everything, increasingly, flows from these questions.

Even worse, while many people, like me, believe that a child’s early years should be about joy, play, and a politically neutral education, today’s elite class now appears absolutely determined to sexualise and racialise our children, exposing them to radical ideologies that have no serious basis in science and then complaining about the rise of ‘culture wars’ when mums and dads ask entirely legitimate questions about why their child is being taught there are 72 genders, divided into separate ‘racial affinity’ groups in class, or to hate their country, its history, and culture.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of debating in good faith and ensuring there is a diverse range of opinions in the institutions and national debate, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it can no longer tolerate any dissent at all, which again you see in the authoritarian reaction to people like me. Consistently, the elite class has launched an assault on contrarian thinkers, demanded that alternative television channels like GB News, and social media platforms like Twitter/X be shut down, failed to stop unorthodox gender critical and conservative scholars from being kicked out of universities, and is now increasingly using ‘hate laws’, ‘non-hate crime incidents’ and opposition to ‘legal but harmful’ views to essentially shut down alternative perspectives it does not like.

What happened to me, you ask? No. What the hell happened to you.

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While many people in the West, like me, think we should treat people from different racial, ethnic, and religious groups equally before the law, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that, as we’ve seen in its reaction to the immigration protests, the marches after the hideous attacks on Israel on October 7th attack, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the ongoing failure to address ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, it’s now more than happy to treat minorities more favourably than the majority, or simply remain silent when some people from minority backgrounds flagrantly violate our children, laws, and ways of life.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the superiority of Western civilisation and Enlightenment values, and on balance think the West got more right than wrong in its history, today’s elite class, which is supposed to value nuance, evidence, and reason, has now become utterly obsessed with feeding its own sense of moral righteousness and narcissism by trying to convince us that everything from our history to science, from cricket to the countryside, are mere manifestations of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘structural racism’. Increasingly, they hate who we are to try and win more social status, esteem, and prestige for themselves, from other elites.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of a politically independent and ideologically diverse media that prioritises truth, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that once respected legacy media like the BBC, the New York Times, and Financial Times, have morphed into platforms for hyper-political activists who prioritise ideological dogma over truth and reason.

And in the universities, too, I spent much of the last decade watching things like the Grievance Studies Affair and the shocking harassment and sacking of scholars who challenge the consensus, like Kathleen Stock and Roland Fryer, all of which made it obvious that the academy is now openly corrupt, highly politicised, and much more interested in prioritising left-wing dogma over evidence and reason —shocking cases, by the way, about which my critics said … absolutely nothing at all.

While many people in the West, like me, think we should be led by the kind of evidence and logic that underpinned the UK’s Cass Review into what was happening to children in hospitals, which pointed out there was insufficient evidence to be pushing children onto things like ‘puberty blockers’, the elite class today has become so radical that it’s no longer interested in evidence that challenges its worldview at all. Routinely, as we still see in healthcare and education, the so-called ‘expert class’ still put emotional blackmail, superstition, and dogma before empirical evidence, even when it involves the medical treatment (read: mutilation) of our children.

While many people in the West, like me, certainly think voters can be misled but ultimately see them as rational beings capable of making up their own minds, today’s elite class now trace any political outcome it doesn’t like, whether at elections or referendums, to “misinformation”, all while trying to tell us with a straight face that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that things like Brexit and Trump were caused by Russia. Who is spreading “misinformation” here?

And while many people in the West, like me, think that people voting for things we don’t like is a bit annoying but perfectly acceptable in a democracy, today’s elite class, as we’ve seen in its reaction to things like Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson, and fourteen years of pro-immigration liberal Tory government, has radicalised to such a degree that it now genuinely appears to believe it is living amid a fascist uprising, that the West is on the cusp of morphing into something that resembles the Third Reich.

In some other galaxy, where the elite class is just a fringe group of oddball people who have no influence over society, these views might not matter. But because the elite class dominate the most important and influential institutions, it’s used its immense social and cultural power to impose this narrow, illiberal and radical worldview on the rest of us —on ‘meaning making’ institutions like schools, universities, government departments, healthcare systems, legacy media, and creative and cultural industries.

This is deeply problematic because while the elite class likes to think of itself as representing the beating heart of the nation, the blunt reality, as major surveys show, is that most of its views are only held by a maximum of 10-15% of people in the West.

This is why, today, a much larger number of people are looking at the radicalisation of the elite class with a combination of bemusement, shock, and, increasingly, horror, wondering what the hell happened to the people who are ruling over them, claiming to speak on their behalf.

While my critics certainly don’t like it, the blunt reality is that many of these ordinary people are much closer to my views than the radicalising views of the elite class, and yet writers like me who challenge if not oppose the elite consensus are now framed as radical outliers. But as Andrew Sullivan said, this is the wrong way round. It is the elite class that is now the radical outlier.

The real story here, the story my critics routinely ignore or get wrong, is actually not about me at all. It is about the radicalisation of the elite class, a minority radical elite that is imposing its values on the rest of society while simultaneously expecting ordinary people not to notice and certainly not dare say anything about it.

Mass uncontrolled immigration. Broken borders. Segregation. The rise of violent Islamism. A stifling political correctness. Woke ideology. The dismissal of biology, empirical evidence, and scientific fact. The closing down of free speech and the public square. The repudiation of our history, culture, and ways of life. And the general hatred and class prejudice that’s now hurled at millions of ordinary people when they happen to vote for, or say, the wrong thing.

When did I radicalise, you say?

You must be joking. When the hell did YOU radicalise.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/have-i-radicalised

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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NOTE

I underwent two lots of minor surgery today so I am not feeling up to blogging. Hope to be back on deck tomorrow

Kamala Harris’ $25,000 first-time homebuyer subsidy and 3 million new homes with building tax credits will fuel housing inflation—just like the housing bubble

By Robert Romano

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has unveiled a new scheme to facilitate home building and home purchases with hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies, including a $25,000 first-time homebuyer subsidy, said by the campaign to cost $100 billion to facilitate 1 million first-time home purchases a year over the next four years.

Additionally, Harris wants to expand homebuilder tax credits to facilitate construction of an additional 3 million new units over that time.

Similar incentives are already used by Congress via the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Treasury to facilitate home and apartment construction and renovation, including $3.3 billion of community development block grants, but what Harris is proposing is much larger.

In the 2000s, underwriting standards were reduced to facilitate an expansion of mortgage loans to homebuyers. a massive injection of credit as mortgage debt nearly doubled from $4.9 trillion in 2003 to $9.29 trillion by the end of 2008, according to the New York Federal Reserve data, as home prices jumped a gargantuan 40 percent according to the Freddie Mac Home Price Index. The number of mortgage holders had skyrocketed from 80 million in 2003 to 98 million in 2008. From 2003 to 2007, more than 9 million new privately owned units were put onto the market.

Afterward the financial crisis — which was created by overproducing homes leading to prices to eventually collapse (by more than 26 percent by 2011) and the last homebuyers in the bubble to be left with negative equity that many chose to be foreclosed upon rather than pay because they couldn’t afford to sell — mortgages settled back down to about 80 million mortgages with about $8 trillion of mortgage debt by 2013. Homebuilding also slowed down, with only 4.3 million new homes constructed.

There it remained relatively stable at about 80 million mortgages, but home prices once again appreciated from their bottom in 2011 by about 38.8 percent through the end of 2016, with still 80 million mortgages with mortgage debt reaching $8.5 trillion. And the pace of homebuilding picked up again, totaling 3.3 million from 2014 through 2016.

Further, from 2017 to Jan. 2021, home prices again appreciated another 32 percent, the number of mortgages reached 81 million and mortgage debt increased to $10 trillion. From 2017 to 2021, another 5.1 million new homes were constructed.

Finally, since Jan. 2021, home prices continued accelerating, up another 32.3 percent as the number of mortgages has jumped to 85 million and mortgage debt is now up to a whopping $12.5 trillion as another 6.4 million new homes were constructed, although, new private owned homes built has been dropping each of the past 3 years from its 2021 peak of 1.6 million to 1.4 million in 2023 and averaging 1.35 million in 2024 so far. Usually, home construction slows down leading into recessions, which Harris is desperately hoping to avoid until at least after the election in November.

But now, prices have gotten so high, thanks in no small part to the $7 trillion printed, borrowed and spent into existence during and after Covid, that the rate of existing home sales are plummeting, just like they did in the 2000s. In Jan. 2021, existing home sales were at a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 6.69 million units sold. Whereas, by June 2024, it is all the way down to an annualized 3.89 million units sold, as 41.8 percent decrease.

So, home building is up, but now home buying is down but there’s still a lot more mortgages. That means there is no supply shortage.

The reason is not because of a lack of subsidies, it is because personal incomes have in no way kept up with the rising costs of housing, only up 18.2 percent compared to home prices’ 32.3 percent. Additionally, 30-year mortgage interest rates have more than doubled since 2020, and with it, monthly mortgage payments on the same unit of housing if purchase now has similarly more than doubled.

It is into that mix that Harris wants to pour in hundreds of billions of dollars of more subsidies for both home building and first-time homebuyer downpayments, essentially a mortgage origination subsidy bringing the number of mortgages to about 90 million and beyond, the highest levels seen since the housing bubble popped, at a time when incomes are not keeping up with inflation.

Here’s a hint. A house that was worth $250,000 in Jan. 2021 is now worth $337,000. Harris wants to give the homebuyer for that existing home a $25,000 subsidy, knocking the principal owed down to $312,000. And they’d be paying about 6.8 percent in interest payments. In 2021, with interest just 2.65 percent, that same unit only cost $1,007 a month when it was worth $250,000.

So, instead of the current $2,192 a month owed for the mortgage payment on that same unit, despite hundreds of billions of subsidies in the Harris scheme, even if the prices of homes magically remained frozen which they won’t, the monthly payment drops to $2,096 a month. Wow.

All that to keep the housing expansion going, as home prices keep appreciating, and as interest rates remain high, postponing a recession that will almost certainly come anyway, only with the potential of home prices collapsing like they did in the 2000s, wiping Harris’ Democratic Party out in the 2026 midterms should she win and likely in 2028 when she hopes to get reelected.

Or we could just eat the recession now, unemployment will go up, yes (it already has by 1.47 million since Dec. 2022), but interest rates will also come down all on their own, thereby reducing monthly mortgage payments, facilitating refinancing and making first-time home purchases more attractive, allowing a more virtuous cycle to ensue. Choose your poison.

https://dailytorch.com/2024/08/kamala-harris-25000-first-time-homebuyer-subsidy-and-3-million-new-homes-with-building-tax-credits-will-fuel-housing-inflation-just-like-the-housing-bubble/#google_vignette

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Short reports

Jew-haters converge on DNC in Chicago: “Killer Kamala,” read one sign from an anti-Israel group stationed outside the United Center in Chicago, the site of this week’s Democratic National Convention. “Globalize the intifada,” read another. Clearly, the Democrat Party’s base has its priorities in order. And if, as Marx once said, history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” then the authorities who are trying to prevent a repeat of the 1968 DNC have their work cut out for them. “Hundreds of people rallying against the Israel-Hamas war and restrictions on reproductive rights kicked off the first protest of the Democratic National Convention on Sunday,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times, “but they were met by an even larger showing from Chicago police.” Democrat politics make strange bedfellows, though, as embodied in this disjointed quote from one of the belligerents: “Rhetoric does not deliver abortion care from someone in a state that has a six-week abortion ban. What we need is action. We need the end to funding to Israel and the end of delivery of weapons.” Abortion on demand or the eradication of the Jews. Can’t these folks make up their minds?

DNC vasectomies and abortions: Get free vasectomies and abortions just outside the Democratic National Convention today. As The New York Times reports, “This convention is likely to be a head-on display of a new, unbridled abortion politics.” The message is clear: Democrats don’t like children. They are literally celebrating pregnancy prevention and pregnancy elimination. Convention attendants will be greeted by a number of demonstrations, including a giant “inflatable IUD” promoting birth control. Democrats see abortion rights as their leading platform issue, which explains why they are going to extreme and grotesque levels to market it. Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will focus his convention speech on the campaign’s support for abortion and IVF. As Not the Bee’s Joel Abbott sarcastically observes, “Looks like the Democrats are working hard to prove the nickname ‘Party of Death’ is false!”

Lawmakers launch investigation into Walz over “extensive” ties to Communist China (Daily Wire)

House GOP impeachment inquiry report: House Republicans have released their impeachment inquiry report on Joe Biden, and there’s no question it was timed to coincide with the Democrats kicking off their convention in Chicago. The Republicans launched their investigation last September, and according to the 292-page report, they “have accumulated evidence demonstrating that President Biden has engaged in impeachable conduct.” The report notes that Biden engaged in a “conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family.” Republicans also allege that Biden family members raked in more than $27 million, largely from foreigners, by “leading those interests to believe that such payments would provide them access to and influence with President Biden.” The report details, “As Vice President, President Biden actively participated in his conspiracy by, among other things, attending dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and speaking to them by phone, often when being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden.” It adds, “Based on the totality of evidence, it is inconceivable that President Biden did not understand that he was taking part in an effort to enrich his family by abusing his office of public trust.”

Mo Dowd says the quiet part out loud: It was a bloodless coup carried out by the most powerful people in the Not-So-Democratic Party, but the Democrats and their Leftmedia fellow travelers have insisted on trying to portray it as a selfless and heroic choice made by a Rushmore-worthy Joe Biden. Finally, though, someone on the Left has let slip the truth. “The Dems Are Delighted,” reads the headline to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s latest column. “But a Coup Is Still a Coup.” Indeed it is, and Dowd makes no apologies for it. She writes, “Even though it was the right thing to do, because Joe Biden was not going to be able to campaign, much less serve as president for another four years, in a fully vital way, it was a jaw-dropping putsch.” This week’s DNC will ignore all this intrigue in an effort to present a harmonious house, a unified front, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Biden will take the stage tonight to paper over all the bitterness, but it won’t work. He was kicked to the curb by his own party, and everyone knows it.

Undemocratic Michigan Democrats remove Cornel West from ballot: If the Democrats really think Donald Trump is an “existential threat” to “our democracy,” they sure have a funny way of showing it. Not content to have kicked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off the ballot in New York, the party of Kamala Harris has now succeeded in throwing civil rights activist and third-party candidate Cornel West off the ballot in the crucial swing state of Michigan. The reason for this ouster? According to Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s elections director, “The affidavits of identity submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office in June for West and his vice presidential running mate, Melina Abdullah, were not properly notarized.” Let’s be clear: Cornel West wouldn’t have taken a single vote from Trump. But he most definitely would’ve pulled a few disgruntled progressives away from Harris. And in a purplish state like Michigan, those few votes could make all the difference.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/109413-monday-below-the-fold-2024-08-19

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Busy with medical matters

So no posts today. Should be back tomorrow

Economist Pours Cold Water on Kamala Harris’ Explanation for Inflation

It's sheer ignorance from her. Governments control the money supply so the government has to be to blame for any across-the-board inflation

Vice President Kamala Harris blamed price-gouging for high food prices, though experts say Biden administration policies are to blame for the high cost of living and for inflation.

“I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food,” Harris said Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina. “My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead.”

“We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy,” the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting continued. “More competition means lower prices for you and your families.”

But price-gouging is not the reason prices have gone up, according to EJ Antoni, a public finance economist at The Heritage Foundation.

“The prices that businesses are paying have gone up by the same percentage that our prices have,” Antoni told The Daily Signal. “So, all of the cost increases that businesses have faced, they’re simply just passing them on to consumers, and that’s why we’re all paying more.”

Harris highlighted grocery store price increases since 2020, shortly before the Biden administration took office.

“A lot a loaf bread cost 50% more today than it did before the [COVID-19] pandemic,” she said. “Ground beef is up almost 50%.”

The Biden administration is at fault for the increased prices, not food companies, Antoni said.

“The government spending, borrowing, and printing trillions of dollars that it didn’t have to finance it all, that’s what devalued the dollar,” Antoni said. “That’s what caused these tremendous shocks to interest rates that have so distorted the economy and caused so much havoc in supply chains and created all of these additional costs for businesses.”

The vice president promised, if elected, to lower prices by increasing competition in the food industry.

“We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy,” Harris said. “More competition means lower prices for you and your families.”

Antoni wonders why Harris thinks she has to wait until her first day as president to address high prices, when she has been in office for three-and-a-half years.

Harris boasted economic improvement since the Biden administration took office in January 2021.

“We were facing one of the worst economic crises in modern history, and today, by virtually every measure, our economy is the strongest in the world,” the Democrat said.

The Biden administration did not solve an economic problem, Antoni said. They created a problem, and allowed it to run its course.

“Inflation is down—after they ran it up to 40-year highs,” Antoni said. “It still is more than twice what it was when they took office. The problem is not quite as bad as it was before, but it’s still bad.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/16/kamala-harris-blames-price-gouging-high-cost-living-biden/

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Trump Can’t Allow Kamala to Be the Candidate of Change

Joe Biden made Donald Trump feel fresh and vital.

No matter how commonplace Trump’s tropes and mode of campaigning had become, they seemed compelling compared to the bleached-out president of the United of States who had become a shell of himself.

With the Trump-Biden contrast no longer relevant, the former president is operating in a new, much less forgiving environment. Kamala Harris wants to run a youth-vs.-age and future-vs.-past campaign against Trump, and she has some chance of making it work.

Against Biden, Trump represented the past, but also change. Against Harris, he’s potentially just the past.

It’s not “old” as a matter of age that’s the issue, although all those concerns are now about Trump. Ronald Reagan was old when he took office, but was offering a complete change of direction in policy and exuded a youthful optimism and self-confident patriotism. The problem for Trump is “old” as a matter of feeling familiar, tired and played out.

The Mar-a-Lago press conference last week was a typical, nay, stereotypical, Trump event — Trump looked commanding against a vivid backdrop of American flags, but how many times have we seen that image?

He was a bit of everything — on message and off message, confident and defensive, charming and insulting, and so it went. Again, how many times have we watched it?

Even Trump’s outrages aren’t that surprising. That he went with the “Kamala suddenly became black” line of attack wasn’t exactly predictable, but nor is this kind of thing unexpected.

And, of course, we’ve repeatedly experienced cycles of hope for a new, more disciplined candidate dashed by Trump’s insistence on doing it his way.

Again, none of this mattered so much against a doddering 81-year-old man who a vast majority of the public thought incapable of serving another four years. Biden was the past in everything he said and did.

For her part, Kamala Harris may not really be hip, but she is hipper than Trump. She’s certainly energetic enough for a full slate of campaigning, and she’s presenting herself as a third force: neither Biden nor Trump, a politician with an entirely new “vibe.”

Harris has another advantage. It wasn’t truly possible to cover up Biden’s weakness. Even if Biden wasn’t doing many interviews, he had to be out in public — at international meetings, at White House events and the like. No matter how much the Democrats insisted everything was OK, he could be seen stumbling, wandering and losing his train of thought.

With Harris, Republicans might (for good reason) say that she will lose herself in word-salad incoherence upon her first contact with a challenging interview, but there is no way to establish it without such an interview.

On the teleprompter, she seems just fine. She’s pointed, amusing, determined and lifted by enthusiastic crowds.

Most importantly, Trump was winning a change election against Joe Biden. Now, he’s essentially tied with Harris on who will bring positive change. The new CNBC poll had Harris at 39% on this question and Trump at 38%.

There is plenty for Trump to work with to pull ahead on this metric. People remember his record in office more or less fondly, and Harris has been an integral part of a failed administration and now embraces almost all of Biden’s policies.

This isn’t a case that makes itself, though. It’s not enough simply not to be Kamala Harris, the way it was not to be Joe Biden.

Trump is going to have to make focused attacks that break through and aren’t lost in the haze of pointless controversies. This presents a tactical question: If the choice is between an overly controlled candidate who is relentlessly on message and an ill-disciplined candidate who is off message, is it clear that the former (Harris) is worse than the latter (Trump)?

Trump has a new challenge — his opponent is no longer an aged incumbent president who has worn out his welcome.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/109347-trump-cant-allow-kamala-to-be-the-candidate-of-change-2024-08-14

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How Gold Can Save the Dollar

Can we save the dollar before central banking kills it?

Yes. It’s surprisingly easy. And, as you might expect, it involves gold.

As federal deficits hit 8% of gross domestic product—unprecedented in peacetime—and our national debt hits $35 trillion—unprecedented in the history of man—even the central bankers realize that this isn’t sustainable.

That we are coming to the day our paper money utopia crumbles.

Historically, from Song Dynasty China to Weimar Germany, when paper dies we return to hard money. Because hard money is the only way to finally kill the money printer.

Happily, we can actually do this without the crash.

The other day Fox Business financial journalist Charles Payne sent me a quote by 1970s Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, who wrote, paraphrasing: It is a sobering fact that central banking has led to more inflation, not less. We did better with the 19th-century gold standard, with passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with “free banking.” The power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money and, ultimately, the power to create is the power to destroy.

This is a fairly striking admission of failure from—by all accounts—the best Fed chair we’ve had since 1913.

A central bank is indeed an extraordinary thing: It’s a privately owned, federally licensed counterfeiter the regime can use to seize literally everything in the world by printing money.

It’s why we have inflation and recessions. It’s why we have Wall Street bailouts and a colossal national debt. It’s why the government has grown to dominate our economy and our lives.

In contrast, under the gold standard we had zero cumulative inflation over 124 years. We had a federal government that was seven times smaller as a percent of GDP. In 1913, we had a national debt of 8% of GDP. Today, it’s 140%—in fact, it’s rising by almost 8% per year.

So how do we get back? Simple: Back the dollar with gold at today’s price—$2,500 per ounce—then mandate that if gold flows out, the Treasury has to buy it back in before the Treasury does anything else—before it pays Ukraine, before it pays interest on the national debt.

Presto.

Why? Because if they keep printing money it creates inflation and gold goes to, say, $2,600 an ounce.

Now, people can make free money by trading $2,500 for an ounce of gold from the Federal Reserve and reselling it for $2,600 on the open market.

Gold flows out, now Treasury has to buy it in at 26.

In other words, they lose money on the money printer.

That means the Fed and Treasury are forced to keep money creation low enough for zero percent inflation—for stable gold.

This means interest rates above inflation—no more paying hedge funds to borrow. It means no more quantitative easing to buy up rich people’s assets, leaving inflation for the poor. It means no more Wall Street bailouts. And, above all, it chokes off the spending cancer of the welfare-warfare industrial complex.

So what’s next? Neither the gold standard, bitcoin standard, or full reserve banking are remotely on the bingo card for the foreseeable future. And, historically, it takes a crisis to put them there.

But it’s important to remember how easy it is to solve our financial catastrophe if and when we get a politician brave enough to try.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/16/how-gold-saves-the-dollar/

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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UK: Sir Keir Starmer’s Liberal Authoritarianism

The United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has wasted no time in revealing his authoritarian nature. His first month in power has, to be sure, featured the worst spate of civil disorder to take place in the U.K. in many years, and, whatever the underlying causes, this undoubtedly required a police response.

But the Prime Minister’s approach to this mini-crisis has been highly illustrative of his character. Almost his first meaningful action when the recent riots broke out was to give carte blanche – through executive fiat – to police forces throughout the country to use live facial recognition technology (which has just effectively been banned by the EU Parliament due to its intrusiveness) to engage in “preventative action” in restricting people’s movements.

Now, we learn that Sir Keir has also set in train a review of the law regulating social media so as to permit the micromanagement of ‘legal but harmful’ speech online, which will likely see social media companies being required to remove content that apparatchiks deem to be ‘misinformation’. His instincts have as a result been revealed to point not towards understanding, or the solution of problems, but merely towards control. Faced with the first opportunity to exercise power, in other words, Starmer has found his knee uncontrollably jerking. And it has jerked in the direction of China.

Starmer, it is plain, is one of those socialists for whom the appeal of socialism lies not so much in its amelioration of poverty, but rather in its provision of a rationale for the imposition of a perfect order on society – the construction of a “great social machine”, as Sydney Webb once put it, within which every individual must be made to fit.

There is the touch of the Javert about him; he is one of those men who, all things considered, prefers the stars, who “know [their] place in the sky”, to people, who have an irritating tendency to exhibit free will. There is also in the air around him a quality that C.S. Lewis called “Saturnocentric”, which Michael Ward summarised as a combination of the “astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory, and serious”. It is no surprise at all that Starmer should once have made his living as England and Wales’s Director of Public Prosecutions: this is a man who would take to the political task of steering public policy regarding criminal prosecutions like a duck to water.

It should also be no surprise that Starmer was once a human rights lawyer. Some have found it difficult to square these two aspects of his character. Silkie Carlo, the prominent civil liberties campaigner, for instance, remarked in a recent interview concerning the use of live facial recognition how strange she found it that Sir Keir, who purportedly is a human rights advocate, would embrace a technology that seems almost designed to usher a Chinese total surveillance system into the U.K.

But this confusion is based on a complete misunderstanding of what human rights are all about. Human rights law long ago abandoned any residual loyalty it might have had to anything so laughably quaint as civil liberties. What human rights promises, indeed, is the exact opposite of civil liberties – namely, the most complete form of tyranny that can be imagined, achieved not in the form of anything so dramatic as individual dictatorship, but in the form of a system of total and continuous regulation of each and every human interaction in the name of perfect autonomy and equality.

Most people do not have anything like an adequate conceptual framework, or even the terminology, to understand this – which is why people like Carlo go so badly wrong in their interpretation of the actions of the Keir Starmers of this world. But I will do my best to elucidate it for you here.

The first thing is to understand what is really meant by ‘liberalism’: that is, the ideology that holds that the purpose of political power, in the form of the State, is to liberate. Here, the important point to emphasise is that, while many people still have a vague notion in their heads that this means that the State should be small, it is of course a recipe for the biggest State that there could possibly be.

The essence of liberalism is the construction of a relationship between the autonomous individual and the State which guarantees, and fosters, that autonomy, and this means that the State must intervene in society in literally every single point to ensure that all individuals maximally enjoy the exercising of their autonomy at any given moment. Any social institution, whether concrete or abstract, which might constrain individual autonomy – family, church, community, employer, business, social norm, cultural taboo – must be broken down insofar as it provides a constraint, with the result being that there is prima facie no barrier that may be permitted to exist anywhere against State action.

The important corollary of this is that since the State must maximise individual autonomy it must also maximise individual equality – in the sense that all individuals must at all times be made to enjoy perfect equilibrium of both opportunities and outcome. Liberation always gestures towards the absolute abolition and prohibition of hierarchy of any kind, because where hierarchies are found to exist, individual autonomy is in some sense or other inhibited for those who are lower in that hierarchy than higher in it. Liberal government must then always work to ensure that nobody can find himself in a position of superior status to anybody else. And liberalism, therefore, in its relentless drive to liberate, also constructs a relationship between the individual and the State in which the latter guarantees to the former that, in perpetuity, it will instantiate itself as a great moderating force in society to ensure that nobody is ever able to occupy a position of ‘privilege’ vis-à-vis anybody else.

The inconsistencies and self-contradictions in all of this are evident to anybody with two brain cells to rub together; it is definitionally impossible to reconcile autonomy and equality in practice, because, since everybody is different and has different sets of abilities, as soon as anybody exerts their autonomy in any meaningful sense it will inevitably produce inequalities. The fact that a free market necessarily produces big differentials in wealth is an obvious example of this.

But this irreconcilability is, as the kids say these days, a feature of liberalism, rather than a bug – it is the reason why there needs to be a liberal State at all. Communists (and this is one of the admittedly good things one can say about Marx and Engels) at least had a notion, as harebrained as it may have been, that there would one day not need to be a State, and that it would “wither away” once scarcity was in effect abolished. Liberalism has no such notion, because it posits the complete regulation by the State of all human interactions in perpetuity. And it needs to do this because it has to always make a plausible claim to be creating the conditions in which the irreconcilable imperatives of autonomy and equality can be somehow reconciled.

Liberals are therefore perfectly happy to accept trade-offs in this regard, because the making of trade-offs itself justifies the ongoing existence of liberal government. There must be somebody (John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Thomas Piketty, etc.) to declare to what extent inequalities in wealth are to be tolerated and on what basis, and to what extent redistribution should occur so as to optimise the relationship between autonomy and equality – and, naturally, a vast administrative State to fine tune that calibration from year to year, day to day, moment to moment. And this, of course, indicates the extent to which socialism and liberalism are tied together – and are really to be thought of as features of the same phenomenon, since liberalism will necessarily entail some degree of socialist redistribution and socialist redistribution will always necessarily take place on the basis of attempts to liberate the weak from economic dominance.

This all means that liberalism is to be understood to be quintessentially adjudicative in nature. The liberal State posits itself as a kind of omniscient and omnipotent referee, constantly umpiring a vast game conducted between millions upon millions of autonomous and equal individuals. It is a permanent, pervasive, and potent third party, always present in any given circumstance to interject so as to make one person a little more equal vis-à-vis some other person or persons, or to make one person a little more autonomous. One cannot escape from it, because escape is what it cannot permit – that would ruin the perfect system of optimisation which is always and everywhere to take place. And it has no principled limit, precisely because liberation itself has no logical limit – liberalism never has anywhere to go but onwards, downwards, and further in.

The result of this is a liberal authoritarianism which people do not really have the vocabulary to describe even as they sense that it is in motion and relentlessly advancing all the time. It has long gone past the point at which it could be rationally justified (there were formal inequalities that needed to be torn down; there were people in our societies who were living in de jure or de facto bondage) and has now shifted into fifth gear, such that we can properly begin to discern its pathologies and disastrous consequences. But the important point to re-emphasise is that ‘liberal authoritarianism’ is not an oxymoron; it is the inevitable playing out of the main predicate of liberalism itself, which is, to repeat, the repudiation of inequality, since equality is the necessary corollary of liberation conceived as the very purpose of government.

This makes human rights the perfect technology of liberal government, and of liberal political reason, because human rights law postulates the existence of a vast network of rights that drape themselves like a blanket over every feature of human existence and thereby always provide the justification for adjudication on the part of the State at any given moment. Everybody has the rights to freedom of association, to health, to education, to non-discrimination, to life, to freedom of expression, to privacy, to food, to housing, and so on and so forth – and the fact that these things cannot be made perfectly reconcilable with one another, and that anybody’s rights have to end where other peoples’ rights begin, allows there to spring into being an entire modulating framework designed to administer the necessary adjustments and compromise between competing rights claims – and it is in this practice that liberal government finds its justification and complete expression.

This happens judicially through the absurd conceit of ‘proportionality’ (whereby courts exercise purported oversight over the trade-offs authorities make between the protection of rights and the ‘public interest’). But ideally it happens internally within the institutions of government themselves (and also, of course, within private institutions), because the very existence of the permanent third party and its known motivations causes people to modulate their own conduct accordingly. Human rights therefore set in train, and legitimate, a total system of government based on the reconciliation and modulation of rights claims that could be made by anyone, against anyone else, at any time. It is the constitutionalisation, as it were, of Alexandre Kojève’s “‘instinct’ or ‘program’ regulating all individuals completely and finally” (as described by Kojève’s biographer, Jeff Love).

This connection between human rights and liberal authoritarianism is not widely understood, but is obvious when one thinks about the way human rights typically feature in our legal landscape – not as a way to restrain State power in general (think about how human rights activists completely vacated the scene during the Covid lockdown era) but as a way to determine who gets what from the State at a given point in time. Human rights do not limit State power per se, but only as a means of shaping the scope of executive decision-making so as to guide it towards liberation and equality – or to help decision-makers in an individual case find an appropriate reconciliation between those two imperatives, or between competing claims.

The appeal of this to somebody like Starmer, who likes everyone to fit nicely together into a grand, intricate and orderly social machine, is obvious – as is the idea that he might be the one who ultimately gets to press the buttons and pull the levers so as to fine-tune that machine to its absolutely perfect modulation. So, the fact that he had a career as a human rights lawyer before entering into politics is absolutely fitting, and there is nothing unexpected or self-contradictory about his apparent lurch towards authoritarianism when in office. Authoritarianism is entirely in keeping with the zealous adherence to human rights – it is just that we do not really not have a way of conceptualising the phenomenon of liberal authoritarianism as such, and therefore imagine the two things to be somehow contradictory when they are in fact closely linked.

In closing, it is worth mentioning something about how democracy fits into this picture. Starmer, like any good liberal authoritarian, does not like democracy. He does not like it in the narrow sense of people voting for things which government puts into effect (overseas readers may not know that he was one of the doughtiest champions of the attempt to overturn the 2016 EU referendum result), and he does not like it in the broad sense of public participation in politics. What he likes is operationalised bossiness, and that is really the stock-in-trade of liberal authoritarian practice at ground level: a supercilious demand for participation in the liberal project which also always imbues the subject with a vague feeling of shame for having failed to realise in advance what was expected of him.

This is why Starmer has taken to the task of suppression of ‘legal but harmful’ speech with such alacrity, and it is this that is likely to set the tone for his period in office. We are going to have to participate in realising the particular vision of autonomy and equality which Starmer’s government have in mind for us, and we are going to have to get used to being chided, in the manner of a bad dog who has made a mess in the kitchen, when we fall short of what is expected of us. We may be allowed to exert our right to freedom of expression in response – but only in the sense that it is modulated by the State-as-umpire, and reconciled with all of the other rights with which it might potentially conflict, and only therefore in such a way that the power of the liberal State over society will be extended, rather than curtailed. The State will get bigger in the economic sense (it always does under a Labour government). But it will also get bigger conceptually, and in its role with respect to the constant supervision of society. It will become both more liberal and more authoritarian – and my strong suspicion is that in five years’ time we will therefore have a much better handle on what liberal authoritarianism entails than we do at present.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/08/14/sir-keir-starmers-liberal-authoritarianism/

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Vance Proved Why He’s Trump’s Greatest Wingman

While Vice President Kamala Harris dodges the media entirely, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz grapples with the fallout of decades of him lying about his service record, Ohio Sen. JD Vance went into the lion’s den on Sunday and emerged victorious.

Pundits have debated ad nauseam whether former President Donald Trump made the correct choice when he picked Vance as his running mate in 2024. Hopefully, that ended after Vance appeared on regime media’s Sunday shows. A hostile press is never going to be kind to a Republican ticket unless, of course, they align with their globalist agenda that sells out Americans. Vance knew that going in. But unlike Walz, who only pretends to be a warrior, Vance is one.

On Sunday, Vance went on CNN with host Dana Bash and ABC with host Jon Karl. Bash and Karl expected to throw several minutes of gotcha-style questions at him, seemingly hoping they’d have several viral soundbites to bury the Trump campaign. Instead of this happening for them, Vance was able to reach left-wing audiences, constantly being fed a steady serving of Democrat propaganda and expertly combated their narratives. (As Media Defends Marxist Mr. Magoo, Trump Ground Game Quietly Explodes)

Let’s talk about his ABC conversation with Karl first because, arguably, this was the most important discussion between the two. In the 16 minutes Karl interviewed Vance, he never once talked about Walz repeatedly lying about his service record, which has been a viral discussion over the last week after several reports exposed Walz for stolen valor by falsely claiming he deployed to Iraq during the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Walz used these claims to benefit several campaigns and even used a rank he never earned on his Congressional Challenge coin.

Karl completely ignored this glaring problem and decided to focus his last question on Trump’s comments during a recent Montana rally about Walz’s position on parental rights related to so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, which is just a euphemism for state-sanctioned child sex changes.

“And finally, before you go, we commit to this race to kind of sticking to the facts? I mean, I heard Donald Trump give this speech in Montana he just gave, and he said that Tim Walz has signed a letter letting the state kidnap children to change their gender, that- allowing pedophiles to claim, you know, I mean, to be exempt from crimes. This is not true. It’s not remotely true,” Karl said to Vance.

A typical weak-kneed Republican, the ones Americans have been used to for decades, would have likely denounced Trump’s comments or claimed that he misspoke. But Vance didn’t give the expected response. He went on the offensive.

“What President Trump said, Jon, is that Tim Walz has supported taking children from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender reassignment. That is crazy. And, by the way, Tim Walz gets on his high horse about “mind your own damn business.” One way of minding your own damn business, Jon, is to not try to take my children away from me if I have different moral views than you,” Vance responded. (ROOKE: Police Association In Blue State Is Finally Fed Up With Mayor)

Karl became visibly frustrated. He was then forced to attempt to defend Walz’s insane position, which backfired. Not only was Vance able to support Trump’s claims that Walz did, in fact, support a bill that would allow children to go through sex change surgeries without parental consent, but he also got Karl to admit that while ABC is hell-bent on defending Harris’s VP pick from questions about his record, Harris has refused to sit down for any media interviews to discuss her policies on crime, immigration, or the economy.

Vance did all of this to an audience who would have otherwise never heard this point of view because, again, regime media only give them cooked-up leftist propaganda.

Similarly, Vance took on Bash, who, unlike Karl, brought up the stolen valor attacks against Walz. Bash wanted to defend the Harris camp from the allegations, but Vance refused.

In the interview, Bash initially argues that Walz filed to retire from the National Guard in February 2005, two months before it was announced that his unit would deploy to Iraq. However, Vance pointed out that this claim was debunked on CNN the night before when one of the people in charge of Walz came on their network saying that Walz knew that his unit would deploy in the fall of 2004, months before he filed for retirement.

“Dana, I’m not interested in the ad hominem. I’ve heard from a lot of veterans’ groups who criticize Tim Walz. The question is: he said he served in war and he didn’t. That is a dishonesty. I really- I couldn’t care less what one or the other person says about it. I care about what the truth is. The truth is that Tim Walz didn’t tell the truth, and importantly, Dana, this is about Kamala Harris’s judgment. And I think that when you ask, ‘Why has Kamala Harris allowed the border to be wide open? Why has Kamala Harris supported policies that have promoted the increase in inflation?’ I think it goes to the heart of her judgment, and I think that that’s what we should be talking about,” Vance said.

Once again, Vance was able to turn regime media (this time CNN) into a valuable mouthpiece that exposes Harris, not Trump. It’s Harris who has failed the American people in terms of the economy, open borders, and bad judgment calls. She picked a man who abandoned his troops as they were set to deploy for war. Despite the attempts regime media make to defend her and prop her up, she’s a disaster.

On Sunday, Vance proved he could combat the lies and hold his own against hostile hosts. He defended Trump’s positions and made them relatable to viewers who likely would have never heard them. He was the perfect pick at the right time.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/08/12/rooke-vance-trump-sunday-shows/

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Win or lose, Vance has sparked a revolution across conservatism

A Leftist perspective with some truth in it below by Timothy J. Lynch, professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Donald Trump has already made three decisions that will determine how history remembers him. First, he agreed to debate Joe Biden. This revealed a president in such a state of cognitive decline that his party forced him to step aside; beating his replacement, Kamala Harris, will be much harder. He’s thus far proving not very good at it. Was this the Democratic plan all along?

Second, Trump chose to turn his head at just the right moment to miss, by centimetres, a would-be assassin’s bullet; he suddenly (and prematurely, see decision 1) became the inevitable winner in November.

Third, he chose JD Vance as his running mate. He needed a centrist, ideally a governor, to win over the swinging independent voters who hold the key to the White House. Kamala Harris gets this electoral logic. She picked Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a progressive who has won over red parts of his state. Instead, Trump went for a bearded 39-year-old, with a thin executive CV, who leftists will demonise as a woman-hating (and cat-hating) far-right “weirdo”. (Vance has ­insisted he has nothing against cats.)

Sky News host Danica De Giorgio says Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance has “mocked” Vice President Kamala Harris in front of Air Force Two.
I think this third decision, assuming he sticks with it, in the short term, will cost Trump the election. But it will reframe the nature of conservative politics for a generation. And it is for that legacy we will remember Donald Trump, whether he wins or loses on November 5. His remaking of the Republican Party will be how he is written about in 100 years.

No Republican since Ronald Reagan and no Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt has had a deeper and almost certainly lasting impact on their party. Picking Vance, regardless of the electoral outcome, shows us how, in at least three crucial ways, the right has been transformed.

First, on the economy. Economics was what conservatives thought they had got right. They won the cold war with a superior economic system, obviously? Adapt it for the era of peace to come, right? This meant decades of free trade and the deification of globalisation. But, as George Will, the godfather of a now displaced conservatism, bemoaned “the winds of globalisation have casualties, and the Republicans did not address it”. Now they have.

Decades of free trade built up China’s industrial base and defenestrated America’s. Vance’s terrifically readable Hillbilly Elegy has become the most important book about that suicidal decline; Barack Obama’s books are snore-fests by comparison. They tell us about progressive elites and how to entrench them. Vance documents a revolution against those elites, and how to replace them.

Trump-Vance have a focus on trade protectionism and workers’ rights that was the preserve of left-wing populism. Remarkably, Vance has found allies for his war on banks from liberal Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren. Trump may have dismissed her as Pocahontas (nuance on race is not his strong suit); he has picked a running mate who agrees with her on corporate tax cuts and the minimum wage. Vance and his allies have even been chided as “pro-life socialists”.

The Vance nomination is the most enduring political legacy of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The mortgage-stressed working class has moved into this new, larger GOP tent. According to Vance: “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems. We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach … It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

Second, on culture. Vance’s military metaphor makes clear the second transformation he presages: the embrace of culture war. Left-wing commentators have dismissed Vance as an anti-woman, “superconservative Catholic”. The aversion to him is less that he believes in the rights of unborn children. Rather, Vance is prepared to fight the left on a cultural battlefield – reproductive rights – they assumed they had captured in perpetuity.

The Republican establishment fought shy on abortion. Ronald Reagan, for example, was agnostic on the issue. The new counter-establishment Vance represents has changed this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the Democrats’ greatest intellectual politician. Like Vance, he came from a broken, working-class home. And, like Vance, he acknowledged “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself”.

I’ve assessed in these pages how Christopher Rufo’s new manifesto was a conservative call to arms: fight the left in their own backyard. March back through the institutions stolen by progressives. Reclaim the language. Defy the woke. Vance is those prescriptions made flesh.

Democrats may win in November. But the next several elections will be fought on cultural terrain that Vance’s conservative movement will be much more adept at fighting on.

This will, in turn, alter the ­nature of the American left. This evolution in American politics is no bad thing and certainly long overdue. It won’t come via the Democratic ticket – despite its unique identity politics dynamics.

Kamala Harris represents a dreary, shopworn progressive consensus. Its failure is evident on the streets of San Francisco. Instead, systemic change will come via conservative forces. There is irony in that.

The more Vance and his compadres speak in the language of the working class left, the more Democrats will have to re-evaluate their capture by educated, middle class elites. The Democratic establishment’s greatest fear is a revitalised Republicanism (a New Right) that combines cultural conservatism with economic security.

The challenge facing the new GOP is the development of a technocratic class – men and women who can run government, rather than simply denounce it – capable of policy design and implementation. Comfortable with Big Tech, Vance sees Silicon Valley as an arena in which to devise New Right policy and foster conservative technocrats. He certainly won’t look for it in the universities. “They are the enemy,” he says.

Third, abroad. Vance will speed up America’s withdrawal from global leadership. American foreign policy has already become minimalist and squeamish. Biden ran away from Afghanistan. He is giving Ukraine enough support to not lose but not enough to win. He is making an Israeli victory over Hamas harder. This trend would almost certainly continue under any new conservative dispensation. If the GFC was the domestic sea in which Vance learned to swim, the botched occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, contemporaneous with it, were his lens on foreign policy.

Because Vance won’t win Trump the centrist voters he needs, the Ohioan looks an electoral liability or at least a nullity. But in picking JD Vance, three decades his junior, Trump has, possibly inadvertently, guaranteed that the transformation of his party, and of American politics, will continue long after Trump leaves the stage.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/win-or-lose-vance-has-sparked-a-revolution-across-conservatism/news-story/813282f509ac255fa39562d5fa8cab95

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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7 Takeaways From Trump’s ‘Conversation’ With Elon Musk

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk had a long “conversation” Monday night with Donald Trump on his social media platform X.

The former president addressed illegal immigration and violent crime, dangerous foreign leaders, the toll of high inflation and taxes, and the need to cut government spending and regulations while encouraging domestic production of oil and natural gas.

These topics and more all came up after Musk and Trump dwelled for over 20 minutes on Trump’s narrow escape a month ago from a would-be assassin’s bullets.

Trump did seem to have trouble focusing on Vice President Kamala Harris as his opponent in the Nov. 5 election, after Democrats pressured President Joe Biden to step aside and he endorsed Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket.

“She’s a believer in the radical Left,” Trump said at one point, “and he wasn’t.”

The number of those who tuned in during the course of the interview wasn’t clear. Toward the end, X showed 30.6 million were tuned in.

Musk has financially supported a pro-Trump political action committee during this race. Though he has not always been a Trump supporter.

Musk has said he was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama, and noted that he reluctantly voted for Biden in 2020. During the Republican presidential primary, Musk supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who eventually bowed out.

Here are seven key takeaways from the Trump-Musk discussion.

1. ‘Government Efficiency Commission’

“They want the American dream back,” Trump said of Americans at one point, talking about soaring prices for eggs, bacon, milk, and other staples in recent years.

Musk focused a bit on something that hasn’t been considered a strong point for Trump on the Right—reining in government spending.

“Inflation is caused by government overspending,” Musk said, then asked: “Would you agree that we need to take a look at government spending, and have perhaps a government efficiency commission that tries to make the spending sensible so that the country lives within its means, just like a person does?”

Trump responded that the government doesn’t routinely negotiate prices the way businesses do, but that he negotiated $1.6 billion in savings on upgrades for Air Force One.

Now, he said, the “dopey suckers” aren’t negotiating government contracts.

Musk pressed again, and this time volunteered his help.

“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and ensures taxpayers’ hard-earned money is spent in a good way,” Musk said. “I’d be happy to help out on such a commission if it were formed.”

Trump replied, “I’d love it.”

“You, you’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said. “I look at what you do. You walk in, I won’t mention the name, they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ You would be very good. You would love it.”

The Kamala Harris HQ responded in a post on X: “Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions.”

2. ‘Made Me More of a Believer’

Musk began the conversation by asking Trump about the attempted assassination at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

A bullet grazed his right ear, the former president recalled, as he turned slightly to talk about an oversize chart showing illegal immigration numbers during the Trump-Pence administration years with the much higher numbers of the Biden-Harris administration.

“It was a bigger miracle that I was looking directly at the shooter, so [the bullet] hit me at an angle that was far less destructive than any other miracle,” Trump told Musk in the audio interview on X.

One rallygoer was killed and two others wounded by the shooter, and Trump expressed sorrow that they were hit by bullets meant for him.

“For those people that don’t believe in God, I think we’ve all got to start thinking about that,” Trump said. “I’m a believer, but it’s made me more of a believer, I think. A lot of great people have said that to me, actually. It was amazing that I happened to be turned at that perfect angle.”

Musk, who endorsed Trump after the attempt to kill him, called him “courageous” Monday night for standing up and pumping his fist after being hit.

3. ‘Illegal Immigration Saved My Life’

The two talked about the shooting at some length, dwelling on the large chart depicting unlawful border crossings that led Trump to tilt his head in a certain direction.

“Illegal immigration saved my life,” Trump said at one point, prompting laughter from Musk.

Trump regularly campaigns on restoring border security and keeping criminal gangs and drug traffickers from entering the country. The former president also has promised the “largest deportation effort” in history to send home illegal aliens admitted by the Biden-Harris administration.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., had his staff create the original chart for use during a hearing.

“I’ll be sleeping with that chart. That chart was very important for a lot of reasons,” Trump said.

He mentioned several times that Harris had the unofficial title of “border czar” after Biden assigned her early in 2021 to determine the root causes of illegal immigration, a problem that then worsened.

“I saw an ad from Kamala talking about providing border security,” Trump said. “Where has she been for three and a half years?”

“We’re already overwhelmed, Elon. We’re overwhelmed,” the former president said at another point, speaking of illegal aliens admitted by the Biden-Harris administration.

4. ‘Dragged Him Behind the Barn’

Later, Musk used the word “shot” in a figurative way in describing how Democrats forced Biden out of the 2024 race, using a metaphor for putting an injured farm animal out of its misery.

“This was a coup of the president of the United States,” Trump said of Biden, then referred to other top Democrats. “He didn’t want to leave and they said, ‘We can do this the nice way or do this hard way.’”

Musk concurred, saying metaphorically that Biden was shot.

“They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,” Musk said.

Trump began to say, “What they did to this guy … ,” before clarifying that he didn’t want to defend Biden too much.

“I’m not a fan of his, and he was a horrible president, the worst president in history,” Trump said, sounding a familiar theme.

5. ‘Defective Government’

Trump ridiculed the Biden-Harris administration as “defective.”

“We have a defective government. These are defective people,” the 45th president said.

Later, Trump said that in some ways, the U.S. government has become worse than its enemies.

“We have some really bad people in our government,” Trump said. “I’d say they’re more dangerous than Russia or China. We need a smart president, a president that gets it. We are not in danger from those countries because they need us and they need our help.”

Musk did most of the asking of questions during the exchange. However, at one point Trump asked Musk: “You think Biden could do this interview? You think that Kamala could do this interview?”

Musk laughed and responded, “No. They could not.”

Trump replied, “It’s pretty sad.”

“Yes. Absolutely,” Musk agreed.

6. ‘Iron Dome’ for America

Trump said Biden’s comments have made the world less safe, including the president’s talk of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance even as Russia dug in with its invasion of the former Soviet republic.

“Biden had a low IQ 30 years ago. He’s very low IQ now,” Trump said.

“It was so bad the words he was using,” Trump said of Biden. “The stupid threats coming from his stupid face. It could lead to World War III.”

Musk asserted: “People underrate the risk of World War III,” and added, “It’s game over for humanity.”

Trump argued that the biggest threat facing humanity isn’t climate change or global warming, but “nuclear warming.”

Trump brought up an “Iron Dome” for America, using the name of the antimissile system Israel developed as a shield to foil the rocket attacks of its enemies.

“Why shouldn’t we have an Iron Dome?” Trump said. “Israel has an Iron Dome.”

7. President’s ‘Vegetable Stage’

“Now Biden is close to vegetable stage, in my opinion,” Trump said bluntly at one point, perhaps alluding to those who argue that Harris should have succeeded Biden as president by now, rather than just replace him on the ballot.

“I looked at him on the beach [in photos over the weekend] and I thought why would anyone allow him—the guy could barely walk. Does he have a political adviser that thinks this looks good?” Trump said.

“He can’t lift the chair,” Trump added. “The chair weighs about three ounces! It’s meant for children and old people.”

Musk replied, “It’s clearly like we don’t have a president right now.”

Trump added of Harris and her record as vice president, senator, and California attorney general: “And she’s worse than him.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/12/7-takeaways-from-trumps-conversation-with-elon-musk/

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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)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Vance on families and illegals

I think Vance is a real asset to Trump. They were powerful answers he gave below

Republican vice presidential contender JD Vance made a case for himself and Donald Trump on Sunday as he faces another week of backlash around his insults regarding “childless cat ladies,” Democrats and Americans without children.

On Sunday, Vance was asked about his comments regarding traditional families in America and decisions made by people who do not fit that mold. It’s a point that has been viewed by the left as a signal to right-wing conservatives, given that both Vice President Kamala Harris and fellow Democrat Pete Buttigieg came to start families through “nontraditional” means: in Harris’s case, through marriage to a single father; in Buttigieg’s, through adoption.

CNN’s Dana Bash questioned the Republican candidate on State of the Union whether he viewed those families as legitimate.
“Of course,” Vance responded, before pivoting to claims that the Harris campaign was lying about the “context” of his remarks. Bash attempted to press him further, but he easily steamrolled past her follow-up.

“Dana, I was raised....one of the first people I gave a hug to after my RNC convention speech was my step-mom,” he said.

“So she’s not childless, then?” Bash asked.

“Of course she’s not childless,” the Ohio senator responded.

Speaking with ABC News, he elaborated further about his broader remarks regarding childless Americans and the “stakes” that they do or do not supposedly have in the country’s future. Vance, in his 2021 remarks to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, claimed that “we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it” while referring to Harris, Buttigieg and other Democrats — the same people he had just ridiculed for supposedly being “childless.”

“Do I regret saying it? I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has, frankly, distorted what I said,” Vance told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “They turn this into a policy proposal that I never made.”

The senator also discussed with ABC the Republican platform that has caused shockwaves - Donald Trump’s pledge to lead the “largest deportation operation in history” if elected president in November.

Vance and Trump have stated that they want to deport as many as 20 million immigrants living undocumented in the United States. Such an operation would have massive effects on the US economy, culture and communities.

On ABC, the senator was asked what that operation would look like — whether officers would be going door-to-door asking Americans for their “papers.”

"You start with what's achievable," Vance responded. "I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem."

“I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million,” Vance told ABC. “That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.”

Harris, now at the head of the Democratic ticket, has gone on the offense on immigration, as some Democrats have seen blood in the water.

Republicans, they reason, face an unprecedented weakness on the issue after a bipartisan border security compromise that would have given the US president authority to freeze the asylum system was tanked by conservatives earlier this year, on Trump’s behest.

The vice president, speaking in Arizona this weekend, told voters that her administration would pursue “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship” if returned to the White House next year with a Democratic majority in Congress.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/vance-refuses-to-back-down-from-childless-cat-lady-comments-and-calls-for-1-million-to-be-deported/ar-AA1oBOPH?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ACTS&cvid=96e414075dc14a51975c9947c142f351&ei=24

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Harris’ Consistent Role in Fundamental Transformation of America

Since Vice President Kamala Harris’ coronation as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, much of the media has been laser-focused on her “vibes.” They are frantically working to ensure that Harris is “unburdened by what has been,” to use her own pet phrase, and persuade voters that she is the answer to all our problems.

However, if they bothered to look, it seems Harris’ actual record in office is quite troubling.

If there is one thing the chameleonlike Harris consistently stands for, it’s wielding the government against the Left’s enemies.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

Yes, Harris has flip-flopped—er, recalibrated—quite a bit in recent days. But she’s been quite consistent since her time as the California attorney general in using high office to target and intimidate political foes and chill free speech.

In a piece published in The Wall Street Journal last weekend, the Journal’s editorial board criticized Harris for her work in the California Department of Justice to force nonprofit organizations to turn over donor information.

“Harris made headlines a decade ago by threatening to punish nonprofit groups that refused to turn over unredacted donor information,” The Wall Street Journal editors wrote. “She demanded they hand to the state their federal IRS Form 990 Schedule B in the name of discovering ‘self-dealing’ or ‘improper loans.’ The real purpose was to learn the names of conservative donors and chill future political giving—that is, political speech.”

Eventually, that led to those nonprofit groups challenging Harris in court. One case made its way to the Supreme Court, after she moved on to the U.S. Senate and was replaced as California AG by Rob Bonta.

“In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021, the high court ruled 6-3 that the [attorney general’s] disclosure demand broke the law. The court pointed out that a lower court had found not ‘a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a Schedule B did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory, or enforcement efforts.’”

Isn’t it interesting that President Joe Biden and Harris have announced plans to “reform”—i.e., decimate—the Supreme Court. It’s almost as if they want to remove any potential checks on their power.

It wasn’t just pro-free market groups such as Americans for Prosperity that Harris targeted. As an editorial in the Washington Examiner noted, she’s worked zealously to target Christians and Christian organizations.

When Harris was in the Senate, she labeled the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, an extremist group. She even demanded one federal court nominee answer for his membership in the Knights of Columbus.

“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” Harris accusingly asked Brian Buescher, a federal judge nominee of then-President Donald Trump.

Given that it’s a Catholic organization, one would assume members are pro-life. But I understand that with Biden in the White House, that can be a bit confusing.

Perhaps most telling of all, Harris unleashed California DOJ resources on pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who runs the Center for Medical Progress.

As my colleague Mary Margaret Olohan revealed in a recent report, Harris conducted an elaborate sting on Daleiden after he released videos of Planned Parenthood officials describing how they gruesomely extract and traffic in aborted-baby parts.

Just before the sting, Harris’ office had a meeting with Planned Parenthood officials. Planned Parenthood donated to her campaign while she was attorney general and to her Senate campaign.

Daleiden said in his interview with Olohan that he didn’t think it was a coincidence that there was an escalation of the weaponization of government against pro-lifers once Harris became vice president.

“This is a pattern for her,” he said. “Her weaponization of the powers of her office, on behalf of her powerful special interest sponsors in the abortion industry, to cover up their wrongdoing and persecute the people who want to expose it, that began in California with my case, and I think it’s a pattern that she’s continuing to this day.”

Harris’ record is fully in line with how those on the Left want to transform American institutions and society.

They don’t believe that justice should be blind and that citizens should be treated equally under the law.

No, they think that outlook causes inequality and exploitation. Instead, they believe in various forms of social justice, wherein left-wing philosopher queens dole out punishments and privileges to those they deem undeserving or deserving. Then, we will have equity, so this line of thought goes.

That’s how those on the Left govern when they no longer believe there are limits to their power. They will transform a constitutional republic into a banana republic and call it justice.

Harris has consistently played her part in the fundamental transformation of America. On that, she hasn’t changed.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/11/kamala-harris-has-sordid-record-weaponizing-government/

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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/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Health note

I have been battling episodes of cancer for five years now and it has not killed me yet.  Some recent symptoms have however been troublesome and are not congenial to blogging.  So my postings henceforth may be more patchy than usual.  From now on I will probably post less on my various blogs and do so less often. I intend however to follow some good advice:  "Fight, fight, fight!"

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Does Trump know ‘better than the Federal Reserve’?

There are a lot of poitical predictions involved in reserve bank decisions so who better to advise the Fed than the country's leading politician? But there is no question that monetary decisions will ultimately be made by the Fed board alone. As economists say, the president can "jawbone" the Fed but the board remains independent

Donald Trump called for three ­debates against Kamala Harris, said presidents should have influence over the Federal Reserve and conceded he might be losing support among black women during a news conference meant to recapture the spotlight after his rival picked up momentum.

The former president and 2024 Republican nominee said he agreed to a September 4 debate on Fox News, a September 10 debate on ABC, and a third on NBC on September 25. The ABC debate was previously agreed upon when President Joe Biden was in the race. Mr Trump had called into question whether he would face off on ABC with the Vice-President now at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“I hope she agrees to them,” Mr Trump said during the news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Thursday (Friday AEST). “I think they will be very revealing.”

Ms Harris said she was looking forward to debating Mr Trump on September 10, which she had previously committed to. The Vice-President also said she was open to having another debate, without committing to the dates or networks Mr Trump tossed out.

Mr Trump asserted that he had better instincts than the central bank’s chairman and governors. “I feel that the president should have at least (a) say in there, yeah. I feel that strongly,” he said. “I think that, in my case, I made a lot of money. I was very successful and I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.”

Mr Trump criticised the Fed, arguing that the central bank had “gotten it wrong a lot”. He noted that he clashed with Fed chairman Jerome Powell while he was in the White House. “I fought him very hard,” he said. But “we got along fine”.

US Studies Centre Research Director Jared Mondschein says the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be a “very different debate” compared to the one in June with Joe Biden.

Mr Trump’s press conference was meant, in part, to draw a contrast with Ms Harris, whom the former president cast as dodging the news media. “She hasn’t done an interview,” Mr Trump said, echoing a line of attack from his campaign in recent days.

Nearly three weeks since Mr Biden dropped out of the race and Democrats coalesced around Ms Harris as the party’s presumptive nominee, the Vice-President hasn’t yet sat for an interview or taken public questions from reporters. She has held large rallies and given statements to reporters on the tarmac while travelling the country, but she hasn’t engaged with the press beyond those events.

Ms Harris’s campaign shot back, saying Mr Trump hasn’t kept up as rigorous a schedule and ­accused him of focusing on grievances rather than discussing a ­vision for the country. “It’s why voters will reject him again at the ballot box this ­November,” said Harris campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa.

Mr Trump had been largely off the campaign trail since his most-recent rally in Georgia last Saturday, when he attacked Republican Governor Brian Kemp as “a bad guy” while characterising Ms Harris as overly liberal and weak on immigration. He was due to hold a rally in Montana on Friday night.

Mr Trump’s news conference followed a briefing by campaign aides for reporters in which they outlined their strategy for winning in November, largely by courting a sliver of undecided voters in battleground states.

“As long as we hold North Carolina, we just need to win Georgia and Pennsylvania,” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio said.

Non-traditional battleground states such as Virginia and Minnesota – which the campaign said were in play when Mr Biden was in the race – remain in play with Ms Harris at the top of the ticket, senior Trump campaign officials said, further underscoring their view that Ms Harris’s recent bump in the polls won’t last. Early polling since the President left the race showed Ms Harris and Mr Trump locked in a dead heat nationally and Harris narrowly ahead in certain swing states.

Mr Trump acknowledged the changing landscape.

“It’s possible that I won’t do as well with black women, but I do seem to do very well with other segments,” he said, adding that he thought he was doing well with Hispanics, Jewish voters and white men. “White males have gone through the roof,” Mr Trump said.

He said he thought he was doing well with black men and might see less support from black females, but he said he could win some over. “I think ultimately they’ll like me better, because I’m going to give them security, safety and jobs,” Mr Trump said.

He played down the significance of abortion as an issue in the election, despite Ms Harris and Democrats making it a focal point.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/donald-trump-knows-best-better-than-the-federal-reserve/news-story/773adcbbc60fb3edd289c7764f8f95df

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When Socialism Fails, the New York Times Blames “Brutal Capitalism”

Venezuela sits on the precipice of a revolution. Nicolas Maduro, the dictatorial president of the South American nation, faced a near-certain ouster at the polling booth last Sunday. Exit polls and unofficial tallies showed the main opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, winning with around 70% of the vote. At the moment, Maduro is still clinging to power by force. An elections commission under his control released its own results, claiming that he squeaked by with 51% of the vote and designating him as the winner. Few Venezuelans accept these fraudulent numbers, and even Maduro’s leftist allies in other Latin American countries are calling foul.

Perhaps sensing his time is limited, Maduro has now turned to a Soviet-style playbook of violent repression as his strategy for remaining in office. In the eyes of the New York Times though, Venezuela’s problems come from a different source. The culprit is not the Marxist strongman who’s desperately clinging to power or even the socialist economic policies that have thrust Venezuela into hyperinflation, poverty, and a massive exodus of its population. To Times reporters Anatoly Kurmanaev, Frances Robles, and Julie Turkewitz, Venezuela’s troubles come from “brutal capitalism.”

This was the conclusion of the newspaper’s coverage of Venezuela’s turmoil on the day of the vote. These three reporters extolled how the Chavismo movement, named after Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, “initially promised to lift millions out of poverty.” “For a time it did,” they declare, “But in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.”

Note that Messrs. Kurmanaev, Robles, and Turkewitz do not name the “economists” who allegedly diagnosed Venezuela with “brutal capitalism.” Neither do they bother to explain what “brutal capitalism” entails. The Times reporters simply advance their interpretation by declamatory labels. To them, “capitalism” is somehow to blame for the unfolding humanitarian disaster of real-life socialism.

The New York Times’s bizarre interpretation of these events continues a long line of left-wing apologia around the repressive Chavez and Maduro regimes that have ruled Venezuela for a quarter century. Perhaps they had Joseph Stiglitz in mind as their “economist.” In the late 2000s, the Nobel laureate turned far-left pundit gushed with praise about Chavez’s alleged successes in “bringing education and health services to the barrios of Caracas” and did media appearances on the dictator’s behalf to promote a state-run banking scheme that never quite seemed to launch. His lack of self-awareness was on brazen display recently when he penned a new book that falsely portrays Milton Friedman as a “key adviser to the notorious Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet” (in reality, Friedman simply offered counsel to Chile about taming inflation—advice he gave to all manner of governments, left or right). Perhaps Stiglitz, who schmoozed with the Chavistas on an advisory trip to Caracas in 2007, should tend to the beam in his own eye before picking at specks in the eyes of others.

There’s a more fundamental problem with the Times’s reporting. In their strange attempt to reinvent Venezuela’s recent economic record as an outgrowth of “capitalism,” the newspaper ignores the obvious. Nicolas Maduro is an avowed Marxist. In a 2021 speech, he declared Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto “the most important political declaration in 200 years” and professed his fidelity to Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Maduro goes on to sing praises of precursor Marxist regimes, including V.I. Lenin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. He portrays Venezuela as the successor to this legacy and tasks his regime with implementing Marx’s ideas for the 21st century.

Perhaps we should not be surprised to see the New York Times’s Orwellian attempt to reinvent the Maduro regime’s economic ruination as a product of “brutal capitalism.”The newspaper previously deployed a near-identical phrase as part of its 1619 Project, which ascribed plantation slavery to “the brutality of American capitalism.”

As with Maduro today, this historical designation had no basis in economic reality. Most plantation owners saw themselves as part of a pre-capitalist and pre-industrial feudal order—indeed,the slaveowners of the past designated market capitalism as a threat to slavery—just as Maduro deems it a threat to his socialist government today. But quaint concepts such as fact, accuracy, and precision have long ceased to concern the editors at New York’s self-designated “paper of record.” Like the Maduro regime they grovel before and uphold, only the political narrative matters.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/07/30/socialism-fails-new-york-times-blames-brutal-capitalism/?omhide=true&trk=rm

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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://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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