Campaign lays bare debate over what it means to be a ‘real American’

JD Vance introduced himself to the nation as a son of poor Kentucky coal country with family roots going back generations. Kamala Harris introduced herself as the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, one of them “a brown woman with an accent” who arrived with dreams of becoming the scientist who cured breast cancer.

These details, laid out at the two parties’ national conventions, weren’t just intended to fill in the biographies of the faintly known Republican nominee for vice president and Democratic nominee for president. Rather, they were part of the two parties’ explanations for why they would take the nation in radically different policy directions.

The two presidential campaigns, at the conventions and in other messages, have offered far different visions of what it is to be American, part of a battle over which agenda serves the nation best. To Vance, the “source of American greatness” is the bonds built over generations of people connected to their “homeland,” which he said must be defended against imported foreign labour, imported energy and trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. To Harris and her allies, the American story is often about people overcoming racial and economic hurdles, whose aspirations deserve targeted aid from the government.

Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, has prominently taken up the debate over American identity by portraying Harris herself and her policies as outside the mainstream.

Deriding her economic plan as a form of Soviet-style governance, he has continually dubbed her “Comrade Kamala” and recently posted an image online casting the Democratic convention as a communist rally, with Harris as its leader. He has contended that she took on her Black identity only recently, suggesting she is deceitful in presenting herself to the public.

Kamala in 1995, with friend

“He’s trying to ‘other’ Harris” – make her seem alien in her identity and values, said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who opposes Trump. She said Harris had responded in the convention by “leaning into what it means to be an American, how American she is, how she’s a unique American story. And that’s how you overcome, I think, his attempts to ‘other’ her.”

Trump has also proposed the largest mass deportation program ever of people in the U.S. illegally, describing them as a threat to safety and the American way of life.

Vance, meanwhile, used the GOP convention to tell the story of a family rooted to the land for generations, using it to argue in part for protecting the nation’s native-born citizens and their values.

Vance talked about the cemetery in Eastern Kentucky, near his family’s ancestral home in one of the nation’s poorest counties, where he expected to be buried one day next to people born at the time of the Civil War. He put the shared history of the people there at the centre of his vision of America.

“America is not just an idea,” Vance told the Republican convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” While accepting immigrants is part of the American tradition, he said, “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.”

Harris’s convention speech, by contrast, leaned into the idea that her story of a first-generation, bi-racial child advancing to high office embodies America’s promise of offering opportunity to all.

Harris has proposed a sweeping package of tax cuts for parents, aid to first-time home buyers and access to capital for small-business owners that she suggested would help people who had few chances for advancement. “Opportunity is not available to everyone,” she said she learned as a child. “That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.” The two party conventions also offered a more direct engagement in the battle to define American identity. When Hulk Hogan, the retired WrestleMania star, took the stage shortly before Trump accepted the GOP nomination, he wore a shirt that said “Real American.” He then explained what the term meant to him.

“I found out I was in a room full of real Americans,” he said, referring to the convention hall and the loyalty of GOP delegates to Trump. “When Donald J. Trump becomes the president of the United States, all the real Americans are going to be nicknamed Trumpites, because all the Trumpites are going to be running wild for four years,” he said.

Democrats left it to Barack Obama to give the reply. “Donald Trump wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them, between real Americans who of course support him and the outsiders who don’t,” the former president told his party’s convention. He urged the audience to reject that idea.

Democrats also responded by trying to paint Trump as the candidate who is outside the mainstream, given his efforts to denigrate Harris and her policies. Michelle Obama, among others, presented Harris’s life story as an example of America’s promise, rather than foreign to it. “It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life,” the former first lady said.

She added: “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be American.” The convention also put Harris’s great-nieces on stage to explain the correct way to say the candidate’s first name (it is COMM-a-lah) – an implicit rebuke to Trump, who often mispronounces the name and has said “I couldn’t care less” about doing so.

Michelle Obama went further and tried to flip the script on claims by some Trump allies – and amplified by Trump himself – that Harris is a “DEI candidate,” a claim rooted in the belief that minority groups unfairly use racial preferences to advance. She implied that it was Trump who had received special preferences based on his birth that aren’t available to others.

“We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth,” she said.

Vance concluded his speech by saying his family represents “generations of people who have fought for this country, who have built this country, who have made things in this country,” and whose commitment to the country is more concrete than an abstraction or idea. He said that “America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first,” whatever the colour of their skin.

Vance is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri Vance, while Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, immigrated from Slovenia.

The night after Vance spoke, Trump expanded on the details of putting those interests first, promising “massive tax cuts for workers” and new tariffs on imports, among other measures. “We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation,” Trump said.

His vision of improving America centred in large part on protecting its territorial integrity. He said he would secure the border and deport undocumented immigrants, who he said made the nation more dangerous and who squeezed Black, Latino and union workers out of their jobs. Previously, Trump had accused Biden of allowing migrants into the country to “sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.” “At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare, and fully restore the sacred and sovereign borders of the United States of America,” he said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/campaign-lays-bare-debate-over-what-it-means-to-be-a-real-american/news-story/d3e35b7efac2f9b81cde17aadb0bb228

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Kamala Harris Never Mentioned Inflation In Her Acceptance Speech, And At This Rate, She Never Will

By Robert Romano

Upon accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination for 2024 on Aug. 22 in President Joe Biden’s stead, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a short speech wherein she never mentioned inflation by name even though it is by far the top issue in the campaign alongside the economy among voters, according to recent polls.

She dared not.

In the most recent Economist-YouGov poll taken Aug. 17 to Aug. 20, inflation and prices still remained the top concern among voters, at 26 percent and the economy and jobs at 10 percent. Immigration is at 13 percent, health care at 9 percent, climate change at 8 percent and abortion at 8 percent.

Among those who said inflation and prices were the top issue in the campaign, Trump leads them by almost 35 points, 61.15 percent to 26.5 percent.

Elsewhere, 47 percent of voters say they are worse off financially than they were a year ago. Among those voters, they break for Trump by more than 44 points, 66.8 percent to 22.5 percent.

Whereas, among those who said they were financially the same as a year ago, 37 percent, they favor Harris by 35 points, 60.8 percent to 25.7 percent. Among those who said they were better off, 15 percent, they favor Harris by more than 68 points, 79.7 percent to 11.5 percent.

That largely breaks down along party lines, with 64 percent of Republicans saying they are worse off and 29 percent of Democrats. Among independents, critically, 44 percent say they are worse off, 37 percent say about the same and 11 percent say better off. 8 percent are unsure.

Critically, 23 percent of Harris supporters say they are worse off. That could create an opening for Trump, since he is talking about the inflation and prices issue. Especially, since by every measure, personal incomes have definitely not kept up with consumer inflation even when government transfer payments are included, only increasing 18.2 percent since Feb. 2021 whereas prices are still up 18.9 percent, according to data respectively collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A good question might be what Harris can say to those who say they are the same or better off but still favor Trump, 22 percent and 4 percent, respectively, without disaffecting those of her own supporters who say they are worse off. To get there, she would need to acknowledge the weak economy.

So far, the way Democrats appear to have chosen to solve this dilemma is simply by not addressing it. But that might only go so far if economic anxiety increases as the election gets closer.

Suffice to say, if the election comes down to better off or worse off, clearly more Americans say they are worse off than better off, and could give Trump a slight edge, especially if he can persuade some of those saying they are no better off or are better off, to ask for their support to help those out who are not doing too well by taking measures to reduce costs and increase production.

And then there is all the spending that has taken place since 2021, including $1.9 trillion on the American Rescue Plan for more helicopter money and another $891 billion of green subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

On April 29 at the Economic Opportunity Tour in Atlanta, Ga. Harris stated, unironically, “we are in the process of putting a lot of money in the streets of America…” Trump can ask, does that help inflation?

Trump’s advantage appears to be that he can embrace the economic reality, whereas the polls might suggest Harris might be better off — at least for now — ignoring the plight of Americans suffering through the Biden-Harris economy. For the convention, the betting appeared to be that she can skip past it, banking on enough loyal Democrats and enough independents to get her across the finish line.

It’s a gamble, but Harris won’t think incomes not keeping up with inflation matters until the polls tell her campaign it does, but by then, it might already be too late. Stay tuned

https://dailytorch.com/2024/08/kamala-harris-never-mentioned-inflation-in-her-acceptance-speech-and-at-this-rate-she-never-will/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

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

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

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Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard endorses Donald Trump

I always thought she was too realistic to be a Donk

Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has given Donald Trump a ringing endorsement for his White House bid, blasting her erstwhile political foe Kamala Harris in a speech in Detroit, days after party scion Robert F Kennedy Jr similarly backed the former president.

Ms Gabbard, who served as a Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii for eight years to 2021, praised Mr Trump, 78, for his foreign policy as president, including his courage to “meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners in the pursuit of peace”.

Speaking at a National Guard conference alongside Mr Trump, who is seeking to regain political momentum as Vice-President Ms Harris inches ahead in the polls, Ms Gabbard urged Americans to “stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power”, referring to Democrats’ alleged weaponisation of the courts to prosecute the former president.

“We can’t allow our country to be destroyed by politicians who will put their own power ahead of the interests of the American people, our freedom and our future,” she said in a speech to mark the three-year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 American service members were killed in a bomb blast at Kabul airport. “Kamala Harris has done this over the last 3½ years; she won’t hesitate to continue that if she is elected.”

Ms Gabbard, who along with Ms Harris unsuccessfully sought the Democrat nomination for president in 2020, has become a regular fixture on conservative media since she left the party in 2022, slamming it then as an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”.

“I am proud to stand here before you today, whether Democrats or Republican or in­dependent, if you love our country as I do, if you cherish peace and freedom as we do, I invite you to join me in doing all we can to save our country and elect Trump and send him back to the White House,” she told the audience to rounds of applause.

Ms Gabbard, who was considered an outside chance to become Mr Trump’s vice-presidential running mate before he chose Senator JD Vance, has become an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, citing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine she argues are in part provoked and sustained by the US.

“This admin has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and brought us closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before … I am confident (Mr Trump’s) first task will be to walk us back from the brink of war,” she said in her remarks.

Mr Trump has enlisted Ms Gabbard, 43, to help him prepare ahead of his scheduled first and possibly only debate with Ms Harris, planned to take place September 10. “He knows the issues. He is very homed in on her record in reminding voters … ‘what have you done for the last 3½ years?’ ” she told Fox last week when asked how Mr Trump’s preparation was going.

In an exchange that went viral in 2019, Ms Gabbard tore into Ms Harris during a Democrat primary debate, arguably derailing the then California senator’s first presidential bid, who like her later dropped out of the race without winning a single delegate. “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Ms Gabbard said.

Ms Gabbard’s endorsement came as Mr Trump ramps up his campaign appearances including in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week. Ms Harris and her running mate Tim Walz will launch a bus tour of South Georgia later this week, seeking to extend a political honeymoon during which the 59-year-old has secured a polling lead over Mr Trump since she replaced Joe Biden as Democrat presidential candidate.

With the two major parties’ nominating conventions finished, Ms Harris, who has yet to agree to a press conference or interview since becoming the nominee last month, is leading in the polls by 47 per cent to 43 per cent, according to the latest average by FiveThirtyEight.

Mr Kennedy, a member of America’s storied political clan, suspended his long-shot presidential bid as on Friday and endorsed Mr Trump, injecting new uncertainty into the White House race. The 70-year-old failed to get on the ballot in even half of the 50 US states and his independent candidacy featured a number of twists – including his claim to be suffering from a parasitic brain worm.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/us-politics/former-democrat-tulsi-gabbard-endorses-donald-trump/news-story/0ceaf5adc105f593a6740d78c79f0ad0

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Trump would veto national abortion ban says Vance

Smart move

Donald Trump would veto a national abortion ban, his running-mate, JD Vance, said as their White House campaign tried to regain the initiative after the Democratic convention.

Vance also sought to turn the focus of the election back on to higher food and housing prices as Trump’s pollsters warned of a bounce in the polls for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president.

Democrats made clear at their convention in Chicago that reproductive rights were a cornerstone of their appeal to voters in November’s election after conservative judges on the US Supreme Court, including three appointed by Trump, overturned the federal right of access.

Vance, 40, told NBC’s Meet The Press that Trump, who has spoken of his pride in enabling the abortion ruling, “wants to end this culture war over this particular topic”.

“If California wants to have a different abortion policy from Ohio, then Ohio has to respect California, and California has to respect Ohio,” Vance said.

“Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a non-stop federal conflict over this issue. The federal government ought to be focused on getting food prices down, getting housing prices down – issues, of course, where Kamala Harris has been a total disaster.”

Abortion is banned in 14 of the country’s 50 states, with some exceptions to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest, with bans at various early stages of pregnancy up to 18 weeks in eight more states.

Pressed on whether Trump would veto a bill for a federal abortion ban across America, Vance said: “If you’re not supporting it as the president of the US, you fundamentally have to veto it.”

Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, told NBC: “American women are not stupid and we are not going to trust the future of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country.”

The Harris campaign said it had raised dollars 540 million in donations following President Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, a huge sum that dwarfed Trump’s fundraising efforts in July of dollars 138.7 million.

Trump will try to get back on the front foot with speeches in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week while Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, will kick off their own tour in Georgia on Wednesday.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/trump-would-veto-national-abortion-ban-says-vance/news-story/f5817c604c72fd94578c625db4006c1e

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

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

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

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To get ahead of the curve, the Fed should follow the quantity theory of money

I would have thought that it was bleeding obvious that monetary expansion would be followed by price inflation but I accept that they are talking below about the short to medium term whereas the effects of monetary expansion on prices certainly can take some time to emerge

The tide has suddenly turned on the economics consensus among everyone from Keynesian professors to Wall Street commentators. Their expectations for a soft landing have fallen to earth.

The immediate trigger for the shift and the selloff in equity markets was a run of adverse data last week. It began on Wednesday, with higher claims for unemployment insurance, followed on Thursday by weak purchasing-manager indexes for manufacturing and services. Then on Friday came disappointing nonfarm payroll data and a higher than expected unemployment figure.

To explain why the consensus changed so fast, the economic chattering classes and press have latched onto the Sahm rule. That tool, created by economist Claudia Sahm, correlates an increase in unemployment with the onset of recessions. According to Ms. Sahm’s research, if the unemployment rate climbs by half a percentage point or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months, we will be in the early months of a recession.

This index has identified all recessions since 1953, but Ms. Sahm rightly emphasizes that the rule is only an empirical regularity, not a theory. Since January the unemployment rate has risen from 3.7% to 4.3%, fulfilling the Sahm criterion of a 0.5-point rise. The 3.7% low qualified, as it represents a low that has occurred within the past 12 months. This suggests the economy may already be in a recession.

The Federal Reserve was having none of it last week. On Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee held the federal-funds rate steady at 5.25% to 5.5%. Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are data dependent. Until the data give them confidence that inflation will stay low, or until their full employment objective is threatened, they won’t cut rates. Since we know that changes in monetary policy act with a long lag in affecting inflation or unemployment, a data-dependent Fed will always be behind the curve.

To get ahead of it, the central bank should be basing its decisions on the quantity theory of money, a model that allows for reliable predictions about the course of the economy and inflation over the coming two years. The only people who successfully predicted inflation almost two years ahead of its peak—both in terms of timing and magnitude—were monetary economists.

For more than a year, monetarists have been warning that the economy would likely enter recession this year. That is because the Fed has over-constricted money growth between 2022 and 2024. The stock of money is now lower than it was in July 2022. Since the Fed was established in 1913, such contractions have only occurred on four occasions: in 1920-22, 1929-33, 1937-38 and 1948-49. The second episode resulted in the Great Depression, and recessions followed the other three.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/monetarists-warned-of-a-recession-the-fed-central-bank-quantity-theory-of-money-0b591977

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Trumpenomics: The implications of a second Trump term

David Pearl

As we know, Trump has a powerful – and seemingly debilitating – psychological effect on the great majority of commentators. Very few seem capable of detached, balanced and nuanced analysis.

Many of my fellow economists, the vast majority of whom are politically to the left of centre, have fallen over themselves to denounce Trump’s economics. In June, sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, issued an open letter arguing that Joe Biden’s economic agenda (which no doubt will be replicated by Kamala Harris, if elected) was ‘vastly superior’ to Donald Trump’s.

A second Donald Trump presidency, they asserted, risked ‘reigniting’ inflation given his commitment to raise tariffs and cut taxes, conveniently ignoring the alarming surge in inflation on Biden’s watch. Bizarrely, the laureates suggested that Biden has lowered ‘long-run inflationary pressures’ by subsidising wind and solar energy, which as we know is a proven strategy for raising, rather than cutting, power prices.

Australian economists have been no better, predicting variously that Trump will destroy the international trading system, take control of the Federal Reserve and even, according to one, refuse to leave office once his term is up. (The idea of Trump assuming direct responsibility for monetary policy – and therefore interest rates and inflation – is ridiculous. He may be a lot of things, but he is not stupid).

While the outlines of Trump’s likely agenda are well known, his plans for trade and illegal immigration have received almost all the attention.

Economists have seized on his intention to impose an across-the-board 10-per-cent tariff on US imports, and tariffs of up to 60 per cent on goods from China. While this is understandable, they have typically ignored the bigger policy picture.

Trump is a committed tax reformer, and will want to extend his 2017 personal income tax cuts due to expire in 2025 (these narrowed deductions and lowered rates across most brackets, with the top rate set at 37 per cent). He is likely to call for a further reduction in the corporate tax rate.

And if elected, Trump will comprehensively deregulate the US energy sector, including: removing regulatory restrictions on oil production, natural gas, nuclear power and clean coal; scrapping car emission and electric vehicle mandates; and, once again, pulling the US out of the Paris climate change accord.

How should we characterise Trump’s economic philosophy? His critics have usually described it as populist and protectionist. Sympathisers have characterised it as nationalist-conservative, suggesting Trump favours a big and intrusive government, but dedicated to right-wing instead of progressive causes. In truth, none of these labels fits the bill, or at least not entirely.

While I agree that Trump is no classical free trader, his support for lower taxes and energy deregulation is firmly in the Reagan tradition. True, Reagan deregulated the US finance sector, not energy (although, he famously removed the solar panels his Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof), but there are parallels between these agendas.

In the 1980s, the economic costs of financial regulations (many dating back to the Depression era) became crushing for the US and other Western economies, raising the cost of capital, misallocating resources on a vast scale and limiting growth. Today, it is the extensive network of energy regulations, designed to force cheap and reliable fossil fuels out of the market, which is doing the most economic harm.

The positive supply-side impacts of Trump’s energy deregulation plans, if realised, are likely to dwarf any negative effect of his tariff agenda. (Remember that for large economies like the US, the costs of protection, while not trivial, are far lower than they are for smaller economies like Australia.)

Fiscal policy provides another parallel between Trump and Reagan. Reagan cut taxes but did not touch entitlement programs, securing the support of millions of working class Democrats.

Trump plans to do the same thing. Before we reach for the smelling salts, we should keep in mind that the US’s international creditors, with China at the forefront, have been only too happy – through their continued purchases of US government bonds – to finance its budget deficits.

Should Australians fear or be optimistic about a second Trump presidency? Leaving aside the simplistic view of his haters, it will be a mixed bag.

While Trump is a protectionist, Kamala Harris is as well (judging by the record of the Biden administration). So there will be broad continuity here. And let’s not panic about Trump’s sabre-rattling on China trade, which in my view is more about positioning him for a bilateral deal than anything else, a two-step strategy he followed during his first term. Back then, of course, Trump exempted Australia from higher steel and aluminium tariffs. Given the weakness of its economy, I have no doubt China will be ready to negotiate.

If trade, under either Trump or Harris, presents some risks, the big policy shift will come in the area of energy. Trump’s plans in this area, if realised, will undermine, perhaps fatally, the global – in truth largely Western – emissions reduction crusade. By delegitimising wind-and-solar ideology, it may free Australia to pursue more rational energy and climate change policies.

This all said, it would be foolish to over-analyse what a second Trump presidency might bring. After all, the Covid pandemic, which arguably cost him the 2020 election, came out of the blue. And with the election still months away and recent polls tightening, Trump is no certainty to take office.

It is intellectually lazy, and an insult to the millions of Americans who will vote for him, to dismiss Trump as a fool or would-be dictator. He is neither.

But nor is he a political messiah. He is flesh and blood, a singular politician to be sure, but a politician nevertheless. His plans on tax and energy, if realised, will deliver enormous gains to the US economy and set a positive policy example for Australia.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/trumpenomics/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

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

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

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Kamala Harris’s political strategy: vibes in a vacuum

Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention continued the convention’s vibe. It focused mainly on the usual autobiographical sentimentality. My mother… our neighbourhood… and all the heart tuggung emotion of every American political speech. Whose upbringing is not worthy of a sentimental treatment? It’ a good thing that Australia doesn’t have that stylistic obsession.

There were almost no specifics in the Harris speech, but it certainly, and perhaps unexpectedly, reached the right register of love of country and high aspiration.

It wallowed in abstract nouns and mainly got specific when it denounced Donald Trump.

Nonetheless Harris’s speech had a few unexpected wrinkles. First of all, like the whole convention, it was overtly patriotic.

The Republicans have effectively pushed Democrats into a much more explicit embrace of America, its history and ideals, a more muted critique of the ills of American history and society.

There were American flags everywhere. The crowd broke into chants of “USA! USA! USA!”.

That’s cute and quite smart by Democrats, stealing a characteristically Republican chant.

Also, she showcased the new Democrat way of dealing with Trump, to present him in part as a bit of a joke.

“Donald Trump is in many ways an unserious man,” Harris said.

“But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.”

That’s a cleverer combination than Democrats have had in the past. The whole convention focused a lot on the alleged dangers of Trump, but in a less hysterical tone.

Indeed, one of the features of the convention was a series of anti-Trump Republican speakers. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinziger was especially effective.

The best part of Harris’s speech were a few strong paragraphs on foreign policy. Unexpectedly perhaps, she strongly backed Israel and its right to defend itself but also reasonably labelled what’s happened in Gaza as devastating.

She also said she’d always provide for a powerful US military, “the strongest and most lethal force in the world”, which runs against her quite recent advocacy for cutting defence spending.

She pledged support for Ukraine and criticised Trump for endangering NATO. That was orthodox presidential stuff but she’s never done it before.

Harris hardly mentioned Biden and tried to recapture some of the campaign magic of Barack Obama.

She still offered almost nothing specific on the US economy.

It was still almost entirely about the vibe. A few sentences of substance were welcome but all the more stark because they were so lonely.

Harris thinks she’s going to become president in November. The candidate who couldn’t win a single vote when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, who five minutes ago had a lower approval rating than the departing Joe Biden, whose manifest lack of experience and competence was one reason Biden selected her as an unthreatening deputy, thinks she will sweep the board and, to mix the metaphors, surf into the White House on a wave of joy and love and happiness and IVF and abortion.

At least, that’s the message from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

It was a brilliantly produced and nearly flawlessly executed affair, a Hollywood winner, all the more effective because it shifted towards the new fashions in the genre.

All the stars performed. Barack Obama, certainly the most effective political speaker of his generation, and Michelle Obama, licensed to be the angry Democrat. Bill Clinton, fading a little but still with lots of magic. Hillary Clinton, not quite right as ever. And the newly discovered governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, presenting as the folksy goodie nice guy dad, football coach, high school teacher, aw shucks, just the sweetest guy in the room. Biden, like a garrulous grandpa, on the first night talking and talking and talking endlessly, endlessly, endlessly with his old anecdotes and political war stories, until way after midnight, way after not only his bedtime but everybody else’s as well, then sent away from the party, never to be seen again.

And the biggest star of all – Oprah Winfrey! She’s still got it. She was Barack Obama’s most important endorsement in 2008. Some studies say she got him a million votes. She didn’t campaign for Hillary, and look what happened. But now she’s back in the ring for Kamala. “Choose common sense over nonsense,” Winfrey says.

And Kamala herself, intermittently present, still yet to give an unscripted interview since Biden, more than a month ago, announced he would not run again, the most perfectly curated candidate since Robert Redford in The Candidate, offering the most inviting blank canvas for every hope to be written on since Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.

Bill Clinton suggested Harris, who worked in a fast food restaurant as a youngster, would eclipse his record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald’s. Surely this other record, the first new frontrunner candidate for the presidency to go longer than a month after announcing her candidacy without giving a single unscripted interview, is the more significant record.

Former President Bill Clinton devoted a great portion of his speech at the Democratic National Convention to mocking Donald Trump, from his self obsession, his age, even his obsession with Hannibal Lecter.

The Democratic National Convention, while mostly civil in tone and joyous in the way the laughter track on an old 1960s sitcom is joyous, also demonstrated the new hollowness, the intellectual bankruptcy, the sheer echoing emptiness of modern presidential politics, which has become a kind of universal celebrity dancing-with-the-stars performance. There was almost no mention of policy of any kind, barely a line about foreign policy, certainly nothing so otiose as defence policy, until a couple of sentences in Harris’s own convention speech. Similarly, there was nothing about cyber security, budget deficits or any of that boring old yesterday’s stuff, the looking at the past kind of old politics.

Instead, everything was about the vibe, a perfectly conceived series of empty, and often quite dishonest, emotional high points.

There was less Hollywood than in previous Democrat conventions. The politicians still wanted a bit of entertainment glamour, but mostly they mined their own backstories for ersatz glamour. Pete Buttigieg, the Transport Secretary, an impressive performer in anyone’s books, nonetheless said absolutely nothing about transport and spoke instead almost exclusively about his gay marriage.

The first night was all about feminist women celebrating the wonderful identity politics of Harris’s candidacy. To be clear, any background can furnish a good presidential candidate. Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice would have been superb Republican candidates. But do you really vote for someone because of their ethnicity or sex?

Michelle Obama put the biggest stress on black identity politics.

“For years,” she said, “Donald Trump did everything he could to make people fear us. Who is going to tell him the job he is seeking might be one of those black jobs?”

Her reference was to Trump saying that illegal immigrants were taking black and Hispanic jobs. This was a clumsy, even ugly, formulation by Trump, for sure. But his meaning was harmless. Illegal immigrants were taking jobs that African-Americans and Hispanics traditionally occupied in very large numbers. But Michelle Obama labelling the presidency “a black job”, is that really an example of “when they go low, we go high”?

Similarly, there was the first night’s highlight, Hillary Clinton – we put some cracks in that glass ceiling but on the other side of those cracks is Kamala Harris being inaugurated as president!

The Democrats dialled back identity politics a bit, but it’s still central to their pitch.

As well as dialling down identity politics and Hollywood, the Democrats, in a measured and limited way, dialled up God and patriotism.

Everybody seemed to finish their speech with God bless America, which for some years had gone right out of fashion among Democrats. Lots of folks talked about the help of God and going to church. There were several one-line denunciations of anti-Semitism, and only a few of them were accompanied by the formerly obligatory simultaneous denunciation of Islamo­phobia.

One or two speakers said they wanted the war in Gaza to end as soon as possible, an idea so wonderfully generic that anybody from any party in America could sign up to it.

You could just about see the team of Democrat script writers calibrating everything. There was even just the right amount of anti-Israel demonstrators outside the convention. The presence of left-wing demonstrators helps reassure middle America that the Democrats are not themselves left-wing extremists, but the fact the number of demonstrators is not too big means they won’t generate any real energy against the Democratic ticket on the left.

This was nothing like 1968, when the US commitment to the Vietnam war ripped Democrats apart and there were passionate debates on the convention floor. Nothing happens now at conventions that is not perfectly scripted. As a result conventions are much less meaningful as democratic exercises. The political parties like it like that. No political professional wants an outbreak of real democracy. The DNC was every bit as contrived and artificial as the Republican National Convention a few weeks earlier. Both parties create a kind of fantasy America in which the other side is a mortal threat to democracy and only their party can come to the rescue.

Image is everything. Memes are bankable currency. Democrat congressional leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a speech that seemed staccato and a bit demented until you realised it was a rap performance designed to go viral, or at least to be a little contagious.

Speaker after speaker labelled Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and Republicans generally as “weird”, but this too was carefully calibrated. Mostly each speaker, even the big beast former presidents Obama and Clinton, used the word only once, lest the mere repetition of the word weird should start to look weird itself.

Of course, “weird” is a pretty mild insult. Trump himself has been so brutishly and coarsely insulting, indeed childishly insulting, about anyone he doesn’t like at any given moment, and has himself so often said things that are completely untrue, that he has no claims to sympathy over having his honour or reputation trashed.

Nonetheless, it’s important to see when the Democrats are telling the truth, and when they’re telling lies. The Democrat convention trafficked in untruth at three levels.

First, it offered no policies, while claiming to be providing a choice between good government and weirdness. But American politics is now entirely dominated by the dynamics of celebrity. Policy is the last thing anyone talks about.

Second, it pretended the Biden-Harris record simply didn’t exist, or that Harris had no part in its many manifold failures.

Before the convention, Harris outlined some bare scraps of an economic policy. Inflation was too high, she proclaimed, and she would tackle it. Inflation was high, in her view, because of corporate greed and “price gouging”.

In fact, inflation has risen because of the massive increase in government spending that Biden, with Harris as his Vice-President, has driven. Not only that, prices paid by producers have risen as quickly as prices paid by consumers, which means price gouging is the least of all the problems.

The few concrete policies Harris has proposed, such as government-imposed price caps and government-imposed rent increase caps, would be disastrous and have support from virtually no serious economist. Similarly, Harris has said she’ll tackle illegal immigration. Yet the crisis on the Mexican border was entirely created by Biden and Harris.

Third, and perhaps most seriously, the Democrat convention consistently lied about Trump and the Republicans. I don’t mean here shades of grey or exaggerations but just plain outright lies. Almost every third speech, it seemed, mentioned the threat of Republicans not only to absolute legal abortion from conception to birth but also to IVF fertility treatments.

I found this intriguing because I wasn’t aware of any Republican proposal to restrict IVF. It turns out there is no such proposal. Some anti-abortion activists are opposed to IVF because it involves creating and disposing of embryos. No Republican politician is remotely opposed to IVF, certainly not Trump or Vance. There was a court case in Alabama that threw some doubt on IVF’s legality and the state Republicans immediately rushed to make sure it remained legal. Trump and Vance support it, as do more or less all Republicans.

The lie that Republicans plan to ban IVF is so brazen that when you hear it consistently over several days your first reaction is to assume there must be some serious proposal among Republicans to at least restrict IVF. In fact there is none.

Senate Democrats introduced a declaratory bill mandating a national right to IVF, and a similar bill on contraception. Republicans all said they supported IVF but leave the matter to the states, none of which inhibits IVF. So this pure stunt is then used as a justification for a wholly fraudulent claim that Republicans actively plan to outlaw IVF. No wonder so many Americans hate politics.

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/kamala-harriss-political-strategy-vibes-in-a-vacuum/news-story/f32c7261e652f1db4ac9838e6f063e21

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

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

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

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

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

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

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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.

Support Matt's Work

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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