America’s sick kids are the new political battleground

An hilarious new US campaign ad, styled as a drug ad complete with symptoms, side-effects, testimonials and a gravely concerned voice-over, treats TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome – as a genuine disease. The remedy is ‘Independence’, but the narrator intones ‘Independence may not be right for you. Ask your doctor’. The ad went viral, hitting five million views in its first week, and exciting much comment.

It was the witty work of the effective Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr’s running mate and lawyer, a reformed Democrat and committed health advocate coming to prominence after the recent union of the Trump campaign with RFK Jnr’s push. Her latest follow-up ad plays powerfully on the JFK and RFK assassinations, and urges ‘Finish the Story, Bobby’. It brought a tear to this old Boomer’s eye and rocketed to over 3 million views on its first day.

Unexpected synergies are emerging from the freshly combined energies of MAGA, and the newly created MAHA, Make America Healthy Again. Shanahan herself says that Democrats throttled and sabotaged the RFK Jnr campaign, and she’s enjoying the bigger platform and audience that the Trump campaign is giving their issues, appearing widely in all forms of media. If X is anything to go by, the MAGA crowd is loving Shanahan and her health views right back.

More to the point, a potent sleeper issue is now emerging in the race to the White House, and that issue is health, specifically children’s health. Few issues have the power to move mothers’ votes like their sick kids.

The voting gender gap is an area of notorious weakness for Trump, whose womanising and old-style masculine braggadocio turns off the misses of the #MeToo era. A CBS News poll in mid-August found that 54 per cent of men broke for Trump but only 44 per cent of women. Young women are a demographic that Trump needs, and he is promoting MAHA and RFK Jnr vigorously; Kennedy is spoken of as Trump’s likely health czar.

One small recent poll shows Kennedy voters breaking two-for-one for Trump, but many of Kennedy’s old hippies and alternative lifestylers will never contemplate voting Trump. However, RFK Jnr’s endorsement of Trump will provide cover for some, especially women, to change their vote, as the only way to improve a society ruined with processed, sugary foods and jabbed to near-infinity by a Centers for Disease Control which recommends more than 70 vaccinations by the time children reach 18.

Shanahan herself, billionaire ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, tags her X account Healthy Planet and Healthy Humans. She has skin in the game, with an autistic child. The whole thrust of RFK Jnr’s campaign, and his life’s work, is to clean up America’s corrupted and toxic food, farming and institutional systems; few have been more personally affected by US evils than he has, and his corporate knowledge is second to none.

While RFK Jnr’s family has virtually disowned him, he has the runs on the board as an environmental litigator of note and success, and chairs the Children’s Health Defense, which has long attacked issues such as fluoridation in water, dangerous chemicals, excessive vaccinations and the US’s highly processed and adulterated food supply, heavy with sugars, seed oils and chemicals of unknown combined effect.

It is too early to tell if this will move the election needle, with no clear signal yet in the polling of any RFK Jnr boost for Trump. However, there are promising signs of traction on social media for the MAHA message. This crystallised for me when I heard young conservative podcaster Alex Clark, whose audience is aged 25 to 35, report that leftist influencer mums are contacting her to say they will hold their noses and vote for Trump for the sake of their children’s health.

Politically, health campaigning has all too often been expensive promises about benefits, more drugs and surgery, more hospitals and research, and cheaper medicines, but rarely has the underlying system itself been examined. It’s a sickness system, rather than a health creation system, and long overdue for a clean-up.

There’s clearly a crisis when the nation that spends by far the most on health care per capita globally achieves devastatingly bad, and worsening outcomes, well below that of similar developed countries. US life expectancy is far below that of comparable countries, falling to around 48th globally in recent figures, below Albania and Greece. Autism rates are now 1 in 36 children in the US, yet for US Boomer generations, RFK Jnr says it was 1 in 10,000. Around 40 per cent of US children have a chronic disease, and 60 per cent of adults. Some 40 per cent of Americans are obese, compared with 3 per cent of Japanese. Another 30 per cent are overweight.

America is sick, and one needs only arrive in a US airport to suddenly notice bulging uniforms and vanishing jawlines, amid a reported $1 billion-a-month avalanche of prescription drug ads, the US being one of only two countries in the world permitting them. Big Pharma is the biggest lobbyist in Washington, and the revolving door between US regulatory agencies and big corporations is notorious. In a startling recent example of regulatory capture, as reported on Daily Wire from FoIA-ed emails, EPA clean air boss Joe Goffman asked a chemical lobbyist what he needed to do on a particular issue. ‘Dance You Monkey, Dance’ came the contemptuous reply.

The danger of ultra-processed foods is at last being understood, with California lawmakers recently becoming the first to ban schools from serving foods with six artificial ingredients linked to low IQ, behavioural problems and cancer; RFK Jnr recently told Fox that almost 1,000 chemicals banned in EU foods are still widely used in US foods. Leftist media icon Bill Maher frequently attacks the pill-happy US medical system, and said ‘enabler’ doctors killed performers Matthew Perry, Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Prince and Elvis.

If the Trump campaign can publicise the shocking truths of America’s illness epidemics via the addition of RFK Jnr’s truth bullets, then not only the US but countries downstream, such as Australia, will benefit, and our children most of all.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-kennedy-factor/

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Demise of the old Dems: Hollywood elites have taken over the workers’ party

Political parties can change over time and morph into a new entity whilst retaining their outward appearance. The transition can be difficult to detect, especially for those intimately involved in the day-to-day machinations of the parties. Often an event highlights a change that has been underway for some time. Such was the defection of Robert F. Kennedy Jnr from the Democratic party and his subsequent endorsement of Donald Trump. It was an event that marked the end of the old Dems. It is not so much that RFK Jnr has changed: the Democratic party itself has been steered a long way from the moorings of his father and uncle. It seems often that the only thing the Democratic party of the 1960s shares with the party today is the name.

Mr Kennedy’s withering critique of the modern party is a measure of the change. Recalling that he attended his first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960, he summarised the changes. ‘Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, against imperialism, and against unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy. As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money.’

Whether readers agree with Kennedy about the various issues he mentioned or not, his analysis is pertinent. ‘What alarms me [most] is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponisation of the federal agencies. When a US president colludes with, or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression. And that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.’

The new Democratic party is the home of the Silicon Valley capitalists, the progressive not-for-profits, the Hollywood elite, and a wealthy east coast oligarchy typified by the Obamas.

It was the Hollywood elite led by George Clooney who told Biden to go; it was Billy Baldwin who chastised RFK for supporting Trump. It was Quentin Tarantino who instructed Harris not to do any interviews. Look up the biography of most Hollywood celebrities: almost all of them are Democrat supporters and financial contributors. In 2023, Vice President Harris spent more time in California than almost all the other states of America combined.

It was the Obamas who abandoned Biden when it became clear that he was no longer useful and would lose to Trump. It was this same coalition that fought off the real socialists in the party such as Bernie Sanders and the Gang of Four.

Rereading John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech to the Democratic convention in July 1960, it is difficult to imagine how he could be a member of the Democratic party today. ‘The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride. It appeals to our pride, not our security – it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security…. That is the choice that our nation must make – a choice that lies not merely between two men or two parties, but between the public interest and private comfort – between national greatness and national decline – between the fresh air of progress and the stale, dank atmosphere of ‘normalcy’ – between dedication or mediocrity.’

Much of what JFK said in that speech and many others could be uttered by mainstream Republicans in more recent times.

The change in the party is profound. To take one example: there are no more pro-life Democratic members of Congress. A few years ago, a colleague from the US told me that he was the last pro-life Democrat member of Congress. He has since lost his primary to the new forces. The impact of this change was on full display at the Democrat National Convention, complete with its attendant brash abortion clinics. Ms Harris, as Californian Attorney General was at the forefront of efforts to harass pro-life centres until the pursuit was curbed by the US Supreme Court. And another example: a Teamsters boss spoke at the Republican National Convention, not at the convention of the party historically supportive of the working class. Many wealthy professionals are happy to employ migrants, especially the low paid. Standing up for the workers, as past generations of Democratic leaders did, has largely dissipated.

Win or lose, 2024 marks the end of the traditional Democratic party. Joe Biden will come to be seen as the last of the old Democrats, politically executed when no longer of service to the new rulers. Kamala Harris was not their preferred choice, but now ensconced as the presidential candidate, the force of the ruling coalition is being thrown behind her campaign. Witness the amount of money raised in just a couple of weeks. Mr Trump ignores this phenomenon at his peril. Most of the new Democrats are no more socialist than the wealthy capitalists who fund the Teals in Australia.

Instead of attacking Ms Harris, Mr Trump would be advised to stick to his core messages about the economy, the cost of living and illegal immigration. The working class have much to lose from uncontrolled immigration and the most vocal critics are usually migrants themselves.

This historic shift is not confined to the Democratic party. The Republican party of Ronald Reagan and the Bush family is now the Trump movement. The gulf between Ronald Reagan’s acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in Detroit in July 1980 and Mr Trump’s remarks in Milwaukee is as wide as the Midwest.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/demise-of-the-old-dems/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The New York Times’ Weird Attack on JD Vance

Once again, corporate media is painting a conservative lawmaker’s mainstream views as out-of-touch and bizarre.

In 2017, JD Vance, then known for authoring his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” wrote an introduction to The Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index for Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays and charts looking at the state of families and prosperity in the United States.

Cue the freakout from The New York Times and others.

“Years before he became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance endorsed a little-noticed 2017 report by The Heritage Foundation that proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families,” wrote New York Times reporter Lisa Lerer in an article published Tuesday.

Others quickly piled on.

“The vice-presidential candidate previously endorsed a collection of almost 30 essays by ultraconservative thinkers on restricting reproductive rights and other freedoms,” wrote The Daily Beast. Business Insider fretted that “JD Vance endorsed a report that criticizes people watching pornography.” MSNBC said Vance’s introduction “has come back to haunt him,” saying the index “includes essays that espouse right-wing talking points, targeting single-parent households, divorce rates, welfare programs, and housing assistance.”

The Times, for its part, decided to use a sentence I wrote for the 2017 index to show just how insane they think Vance is.

“Authors argued in the 2017 report that women should become pregnant at younger ages and that a two-parent, heterosexual household was the ‘ideal’ environment for children,” wrote Lerer.

She added, “‘The ideal situation for any child is growing up with the mother and father who brought that child into the world,’ wrote Katrina Trinko, a conservative journalist, in an essay detailing the ‘tragedy’ of babies born to single mothers.”

Now to be clear, as both Vance’s spokesperson and The Heritage Foundation have said, Vance had no editorial control or approval over my essay or any of the others in the 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity.

And for the record, while The New York Times couldn’t be bothered to include it, I also wrote in that essay, “Every parent who chooses life in adverse circumstances should be commended. Many single moms and dads, whether due to later circumstances or a surprise pregnancy, have nobly risen to the task and done an amazing job of raising their children …”

But let’s look at my supposedly radical claim that the ideal should be kids growing up with both parents.

First, my view is actually the mainstream view.

Nearly half of Americans (47%) think that single women raising kids on their own is bad for society, while only 10% think it’s a good thing for society, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll.

That’s not surprising—because the data clearly shows that kids do best when raised by a married mom and dad.

In fact, if Lerer had just read her own outlet, she would know that. In a 2023 commentary headlined “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing,” economics professor Melissa Kearney writes, “The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood.”

In Kearney’s book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” she explored whether the disadvantages children of single parents faced could be explained by income or education differences between single parents and married parents.

But the data shows that it’s the family formation, not simply parents’ education and income, that affect the children. “A child born in a two-parent household with a family income of $50,000 has, on average, better outcomes than a child born in a single-parent household earning the same income,” writes Kearney.

Meanwhile, among kids who have a married mom with a bachelor’s degree, 57% have a bachelor’s degree of their own by age 25, according to Kearney. But among kids who have a single mom with a bachelor’s degree, only 28% have a bachelor’s degree by age 25.

Funnily enough, while the elites may attack Vance for daring to espouse traditional values, their own behavior suggests they actually agree with him.

“Many elites today—professors, journalists, educators, and other culture shapers—publicly discount or deny the importance of marriage, the two-parent family, and the value of doing all that you can to ‘stay together for the sake of the children,’ even as they privately value every one of these things. On family matters, they ‘talk left’ but ‘walk right,’” observes Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, in a February Atlantic essay.

Wilcox, author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” noted that a 2022 survey found that a mere 30% of college-educated liberals agreed that children are better off if they have two married parents. (In contrast, 91% of college-educated conservatives agreed with this.) But these college-educated liberals are not themselves going on to become single parents: “69% of the parents within this same group [college-educated liberals] were themselves stably married,” writes Wilcox.

So apparently, Vance’s real crime isn’t daring to live by traditional values. It’s that he actually shares those views out loud.

Vance, as many know from his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” did not grow up in a stable, two-parent family. His parents divorced when he was young, with his dad essentially disappearing. His mother married five times and struggled with drug addiction. Vance was ultimately raised by his grandparents.

There was eventually a happy ending for his mom—Vance proudly shared at the Republican National Convention that she was 10 years sober from drugs—but it came long after Vance’s childhood.

Vance’s essay in the 2017 index highlights how, years before he became an Ohio senator, he was frustrated by the refusal of the elites to look at how culture shaped outcomes of Americans.

“[P]urely economic questions miss something important about our current moment. Too rigid a focus on the material permits us to divorce concerns about opportunity from those about culture. In some ways, this is understandable: The comfort zone of many elites, and thus, their language trends toward the mathematical and technocratic,” he wrote before concluding, “But talk about it we must, because the evidence that culture matters should now overwhelm any suggestion to the contrary.”

Vance later added:

Recognizing the importance of culture is not the same as moral condemnation. We should not glance quickly at the poor and suggest that their problems derive entirely from their own bad decisions before moving on to other matters. Rather, we should consider the very intuitive fact that the way we grow up shapes us. It molds our attitudes, our habits, and our decisions. It sets boundaries for how we perceive possibilities in our own lives.

Culture, in other words, must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as “the least of these.” It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse that speaks often about the vulnerable even as it regularly fails to help them. [Emphasis mine.]

That last sentence struck me because it gets to the heart of what sets apart the Yale-educated Vance from his elite peers: A desire to actually help people, even if it means being courageous and saying something politically incorrect.

But for refusing to be hypocritical, to live one way and talk another way, Vance is getting crucified by the Left. That’s not surprising. But if we’re serious about helping Americans live better lives, we need fewer sneering New York Times pieces and more Vances.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/06/new-york-times-weird-attack-vance/

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Harris is no champion of women

Vice President Kamala Harris claims to be a champion for women, but many facts tell a different story.

Harris speaks pro-women rhetoric, but fails to protect women and girls from assaults in locker rooms.

Harris endorsed a new Biden-Harris administration rule expanding Title IX protections to gender identity and sexual orientation, requiring schools receiving federal funds to allow males into female spaces such as restrooms and locker rooms, or into any activity currently separated as male or female.

Initial Title IX rules—signed into law by a Republican president more than 50 years ago—protect women and girls against sex-based discrimination, allowing girls to flourish in school and on extracurricular sports teams.

Regrettably, this final rule redefining “female” also threatens free speech on campus, protects teachers unions, and obstructs due process protections for students accused of sexual harassment on campus.

Harris also fails to protect women and girls from sexual assault as they seek to cross illegally into America at the U.S. southern border. Sexual assault rates of migrant women coming to the United States is shocking, yet Harris embraces policies that incentivize further illegal immigration and human trafficking.

Reports vary widely on the scope of the sexual violence, which speaks to the lack of concern that Harris embodies. Amnesty International reported:

Rape is widespread. It is believed that as many as six out of every 10 migrant women and girls experience sexual violence during the journey.

A 2017 report by Doctors Without Borders found 1 in 3 women traveling through Mexico are sexually assaulted. A United Nations estimate found among women crossing without husbands or families, up to 70% suffered some type of abuse.

The rampant sexual abuse is perpetuated and grows the more policies like those from Harris and President Joe Biden encourage millions to enter the United States illegally. For example, under former President Donald Trump, the “Remain in Mexico” program and other immigration policies substantially slowed illegal immigration flow. Harris and Biden reversed Remain in Mexico, and the United States has experienced record, earth-shattering illegal immigration flows. Supposedly empowered to mitigate the so-called root causes of illegal immigration from Central American and South American countries, Harris instead stood idly by.

Even CNN is conceding that Harris is now a hypocrite for using Trump’s border wall in her new political ad to claim she supports controlling illegal immigration. CNN found more than 50 instances since 2017 of Harris slamming Trump’s border wall, with labels like “useless” and “racist.” But now Harris is running ads touting Trump’s wall.

Harris also harms America’s seniors, who are disproportionately female as women have longer life spans than men. In her role as president of the Senate, Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to raid Medicare.

Harris voted for the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, which is treating the Medicare Part D prescription-drug program for seniors as a piggy bank for the reckless spending on other, unrelated programs.

This comes on top of painful, cumulative 20% inflation on Harris’ watch, which disproportionately harms senior women, many of whom live on fixed incomes after retirement and don’t have jobs with pay keeping pace with inflation.

Harris also failed the women of Afghanistan, who are now relegated to chattel status under the Taliban due to the reckless Biden-Harris U.S. withdrawal from the country.

Harris is effectively silent on the horrific treatment of Afghan women by the Taliban, which just passed a law banning women from speaking in public, showing any skin, or looking at men they aren’t related to.

The Biden-Harris administration is directly responsible for the results of the bloody and botched Afghanistan withdrawal, yet Harris says nothing and makes zero effort to help Afghan women.

In fact, Harris has the audacity to claim, three years later, that the chaotic withdrawal decision was “courageous and right.” It was neither courageous nor right to relegate women to slave status and in the process also allow the killings of 13 U.S. service members and recklessly abandon the tens of billions of dollars in weapons and other military equipment left behind.

Pushing people to vote for a female candidate because of her gender is just as sexist as pushing voters to select a man because he’s male. Voters must see through Harris’ misogynistic policies and demand better.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/07/kamala-harris-anti-woman-misogynist-candidate/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The WAR against OUR Past: inside the ideological project to undermine our history and collective memory

Matt Goodwin below rightly notes the decline in British patriotism and shows how that is a loss. He fails to take note of the fact that it is almost entirely the political Left that is pushing that. So to understand that you have to go down into the psychology of the Left. WHY are they so corrosive of British national identity?

There a number of reasons but a major one is that they are born gloomy. The genetic studies show a strong inherited element in political orientation and the research also shows that your happiness level is largely preset. Most of the time a person is either happy or gloomy or somewhere in between.

So the really interesting question is how the gloomy ones have gained so much influence

Most of the answer is fairly clear. We live in a broadly very sucessful society that is kinder to its people than any previous society has been. And that seems fragile to many people. They fear that it might all collapse. So when the Left come out with all their doom and gloom prophecies, They are closely attended to in case they are onto something. The global warming nonsense is an example of that

And patriotism is also an easy concern. There have been notable examples of people's patriotism being disatrously misused by politicians, notably Adolf Hitler. So anti-patriotism has emerged as a a barrier to a possibly destructive phenomenon.

But patriotism has many psychological benefits, particularly feelings of belonging and solidarity, so the attacks on it can destroy much that is beneficial to people. The gloomy Left are good at detecting possible dangers and that gets attention to them


Here’s a story you might have missed. The British people’s pride in their history has collapsed to a historic low. At least, that’s according to brand new findings from something called the British Social Attitudes survey, which has been tracking what the British think since the 1980s. Here’s what the survey found.

Over the last decade, the Brits have become much less likely to feel pride in their country’s history and achievements. And the numbers are truly striking.

Consider this. In 2013, 86% of all Brits said they were proud of Britain’s history. Today? The figure has collapsed to 64%.

And in 2013, while 62% of Brits said they would rather be a citizen of Britain than anywhere else in the world, today just 49% think this way.

What’s going on? Well, the expert class will tell you this reflects wider changes in British society and, in particular, people’s changing conceptions of who we are.

There are basically two stories of our national identity.

The first, cherished by the elite class, is of a diverse, multicultural, pro-immigration society that largely defines its identity by its celebration of diversity.

This is what we might call a ‘civic’ conception of our national identity, a thinner vision which puts the emphasis on respecting laws and welcoming others.

The second, cherished by lots of people outside the elite class, is of a proud country that has withstood all invaders since the Norman Conquest, and which enjoys a rich and unique historic and cultural legacy that needs to be cherished and preserved.

This is what we might call an ‘ethno-traditional’ of our national identity —a thicker vision which rejects racism but also puts more emphasis on our shared history, ancestry, and distinctive culture and ways of life.

Today, according to the British Social Attitudes survey, the British are gradually moving away from this second vision of who they are to embrace the first —which explains why they are less wedded to things like their history.

As the country’s population is becoming more diverse, university-educated, and as younger Zoomers from Generation-Z and Millennials are steadily replacing older Baby Boomers —with immigrants, graduates, and younger people more likely to embrace this civic vision— more and more people are viewing Britishness or Englishness in these terms, repacking their identity around universal liberal themes like celebrating diversity while downplaying their distinctive ancestry and history.

At least, this is the narrative the elite class promote, largely because it reflects how the elite class like to think about their own national identity.

But there are two problems with this.

The first, as we’ve seen through things like the rise of UKIP, Brexit, Boris Johnson, and now the Reform party, is that, actually, millions of people still think there is much more to Britishness and Englishness than a hollow celebration of ‘diversity’.

While the elite class is wants to repackage our identity around these universal themes —saying the only thing that defines us is that we celebrate diversity and multiculturalism— many other people think ‘no, hang on on a minute, there is something distinctive and unique about coming from these islands and we don’t want all this unique history and culture to be pushed aside for things that could just as easily apply to many other countries around the world’.

As I said last night on television, to say that a nation is welcoming of things like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ is fine. But it cannot be the entire basis of your identity because if the only thing that defines you is that you welcome others then it’s like saying you have no real identity of you own.

And many people in Britain and England, like many people across the West, do think they have a unique, distinctive, special identity that cannot simply be pushed aside in favour of a rather bland celebration of immigration, diversity and multiculturalism.

The second problem with this elite interpretation of who we are is that it completely ignores an alternative hypothesis for why people’s pride in their history and culture is declining —and this owes more to ideology than demographic change.

As Professor Frank Furedi argues in an important new book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History, over the last twenty years, across the West, members of the elite class have simply declared war on our past and history.

Cancel culture, Furedi argues, has now moved from focusing on the present towards imposing its narrative on how we view our past and history. The goal of radically revising if not cancelling our cultural inheritance is pursued by reorganising society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimating its ideals and achievement.

To achieve this objective, the elite class consciously erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past.

This is why they target historic symbols of our identity and Western culture more generally, as if these things constitute a clear and present danger to their wellbeing.

This is why great historical figures of Western science and philosophy – David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, among many others – are attacked and condemned for their values and behaviour, as if they are our contemporaries.

And this is why this war against our past, against our history, is relentlessly pursued in the institutions that incubate our young people, including our taxpayer-funded universities and schools. We are funding an attack on our own history, in other words.

Increasingly, as I’ve been pointing out for a while, teachers and the curriculum rely on teaching materials and dubious theories such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), which essentially encourage our children to think negatively about their own history, identity, and the West. Routinely, they’re taught there is more bad than good in our history and cultural inheritance when the very opposite is true.

The curriculum guidelines suggest the deeds of the British Empire are somehow comparable to those of Nazi Germany, while children are taught to be critical of their own history, and the history of the West, while comparable examples of imperialism and slavery in non-Western states —including ones still taking place today—are routinely downplayed or simply ignored. In effect, these guidelines seek to make our children feel ashamed about their nation’s past and, by extension, their ancestors.

At the root of this is not just the elite’s desire to repackage our identity around a universal liberal celebration of diversity and multiculturalism but, more accurately, around a conception of ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’, whereby the British and English are told to celebrate the distinctive identity, history, and culture of minorities while simultaneously being told to forget, downplay, or criticise their own distinctive history and identity, and repackage them instead around universal liberal themes.

As Furedi argues, this elite project of estranging society from its historical and cultural inheritance is proving to be remarkably successful. It is drifting out from the educational institutions and being reinforced by the creative and cultural industries, where the continual revision of our history and past is now visible in everything from Netflix to the latest Hollywood films.

Those who resist, such as by flying the flag, are condemned as ‘far-right bigots’, while icons of our identity and history, from William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, are continually demonised as the personification of ‘white supremacy’. The absurdity of this imperative to render toxic every great individual of Britain’s past is highlighted by the attempt to turn Shakespeare’s hero, Henry 5th, into a war criminal.

This deep-seated mistrust of tradition and our history also extends to the family, going so far as to warn mothers and fathers to be wary of the child rearing practices used by parents in previous times. The advice and views of grandparents is frequently attacked as irrelevant and possibly prejudicial to the development of the child by so-called ‘parenting experts’. As a result of the institutionalisation of these attitudes, children are no longer socialised into the values that were held by their grandparents, and certainly not by their more distant ancestors. As Furedi notes:

“It is through the alienation of society from its history that opponents of Western Culture seek to gain moral and political hegemony. The stakes are high in this conflict since the project of contaminating the past diminishes the capacity of society to endow people’s life with meaning. A society that becomes ashamed of its historical legacy invariably loses its way. It weakens society’s capacity to socialise children and dooms them to a state of a permanent crisis of identity. It is our responsibility to the young to ensure that they have access to the legacy of the past.”

Human-beings, he points out, are historical animals. The past lives on through us. Or, as Shakespeare reminded us through the Earl of Warwick: ‘There is a history in all men’s lives’. The possession of a sense of the past is integral to what it means to be human. If this sensibility is culturally devalued and people become desensitised to its use then, increasingly, our public life will fall under the spell of social amnesia, which is perhaps what those latest survey results are at least partly reflecting.

Ultimately, it is through our connection with the traditions of past and their cultural inheritance that people learn to understand their place in the world. Without this sense of connection our identity of being part of a wider, distinctive community and nation becomes emptied of meaning. And so, in turn, do we.

The harm that is now being done by this war on the past is all too evident in the contemporary world. And it is our young people, growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them, who are the human casualties of this war. As Winston Churchill said, ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-war-against-our-past-inside-the

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump vows to make electricity cheap with ‘hundreds of new power plants’ and modular nuclear reactors

Trump touted plans Thursday to reduce electricity costs by quickly approving the construction of new power plants and spurring the deployment of small modular reactors for nuclear energy — saying it would unleash an economic boom.

Trump, 78, said that more electricity would tame inflation and meet the future energy needs of artificial intelligence.

“To achieve this rapid reduction in energy costs, I will declare a national emergency to allow us to dramatically increase energy production, generation and supply, which Comrade Kamala has destroyed,” the Republican presidential nominee said at a rally in Potterville, Mich.

“Starting on day one, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors and we will slash the red tape. We will get the job done. We will create more electricity, also for these new industries that can only function with massive electricity.”

Former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt previewed the plans on a morning press call, saying, “In the future, every manufacturing plant, every data center, every semiconductor facility and assembly line will want to be built in America — because America will be the place where the cost of energy is lower than anywhere else on Earth.”

The 45th president laid out his energy vision — including tapping domestic reserves of oil and gas and easing regulation of vehicle efficiency — in a swing-state area where cars are made while slamming Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ record as vice president.

“Between soaring demand and retiring coal, we are facing a great capacity shortfall of at least 30% by 2032,” Bernhardt said. “You should ask Harris [and Tim] Walz how they are going to make up for that shortfall under their net zero vision. I submit to you they can’t.”

One new aspect of the Trump energy plan is the boost to nuclear energy, which currently makes up 18.6% of US electricity production — far behind natural gas (43.1%), and only narrowly ahead of coal (16.2%) and wind (10.2%).

Trump will “support nuclear energy production by modernizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, working to keep existing power plants open and investing in innovative small modular reactors,” Bernhardt said.

“President Trump will fully modernize the electric grid to prepare it for the next 100 years, implement rapid approvals for energy projects, and greenlight the construction of hundreds of new power plants to pave the way for an enormous growth in American wealth,” he added.

Billionaire-led nuclear boom

Small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are not currently in commercial use in the United States and none are scheduled to open before 2030 — though advocates of the technology, including billionaire Bill Gates, whose company TerraPower is behind that inaugural facility in Wyoming, think they can reshape the industry.

The current timeline means that — at least as of now — no small modular reactors would be in commercial use until after a second Trump term, said Daniel Kammen, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

“Nuclear SMR proponents will say this is the brave, bright new wave for nuclear power and these private sector operators are going to essentially do for nuclear what they seem to have done for space launches,” Kammen said.

Still, “the number of barriers in design to protect public safety that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission runs means even a massively pro-nuclear president would have a hugely difficult time stepping through those,” the prof said.

Advocates believe modular technology could pave the way to faster and cheaper deployment of nuclear power as an environmentally friendly alternative to high-emissions sources — and outgoing President Biden also has supported research into SMR use.

The major differences between conventional nuclear power plants and SMRs is the power-production capacity — with “small” facilities with cores roughly the size of an 18-wheeler truck generating less electricity.

“There are effectively SMRs operating around the world. Russia delivers nuclear-powered icebreakers to its Arctic cities and then they take the power directly off of that boat. We have nuclear aircraft carriers,” Kammen said.

“If someone really cut away legislation and regulation, you certainly could” deploy them commercially, he added — warning, however, that nuclear technology comes with significant potential risks including human operator-caused disasters.

“The technology of this size has existed for decades,” Kammen said. “These are just machines that are tailored for commercial use.”

Smaller-scale reactors would in theory allow for greater adoption — as has been the case with solar energy, which has grown to produce 3.9% of US electricity thanks in part to increased affordability of solar panels associated with higher production volume, Kammen said.

Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Institute who previously served on Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team, said the 45th president seems to be putting “more emphasis now on nuclear” than during his term of office.

“More work is going to be needed than just that [with] the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He’s also going to have to change how EPA regulates radiation exposures. So I think all that stuff is doable,” he told The Post.

Milloy posited that Republicans have warmed up to nuclear power because it could help counter Democrats on the issue of climate change.

“They want to dodge talking about climate, which I think is ridiculous,” he said. “I mean, they should beat Harris-Walz over the head with climate, especially in Pennsylvania. So they talk about energy solutions [instead],” he said.

Reversing green policies

The former president’s campaign also restated a raft of familiar pro-fossil fuel policies — including easing domestic production of oil, natural gas and coal while trashing policies intended to phase out vehicles that use gasoline and diesel fuel.

Milloy contended that one of Trump’s most significant energy proposals is his mantra of “drill baby, drill,” which he argued would “unleash the US oil and gas industry.” He also cautioned that Trump could run into roadblocks with the EPA.

“EPA is famous for its resistance that developed during the Trump administration — the first one. Those guys slow up things, sabotage them, and Trump’s going to have to appoint strong agency leaders that understand the resistance, and know how to combat the resistance,” he said.

Under the Harris-Biden administration, the federal government imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal land, axed construction of the KeyStone XL oil pipeline from Canada and forbade drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Harris, 59, has not laid out her energy policies in detail but previously supported bans on fracking and a complete phase-out of new gas-powered cars by 2035. Her aides have distanced her from both of those pledges, though the veep has yet to do so herself.

Trump has vowed to claw back at least some of the $369 billion in environmental funding included in Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which Republicans argue has contributed to inflation — which has surged 20% since Biden took office in January 2021.

“Energy isn’t part of the economy, it’s the heart of the economy, and if the energy costs increase, everything increases,” American Energy Institute CEO Jason Isaac told The Post.

Democrats have defended themselves from blame over energy prices by pointing out that domestic crude oil production hit an all-time high last year.

“Go back and look at [Energy Information Administration] projections well before the Biden administration took office,” Bernhardt said in pushing back. “What you would see is that the projections far exceeded today’s current production. And so, while production has increased, the reality is that’s actually below what would have occurred under the policies of President Trump.

“So they can take credit for missing the mark.”

https://nypost.com/2024/08/29/us-news/trump-vows-to-make-electricity-cheap-with-hundreds-of-new-power-plants-and-modular-nuclear-reactors/

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Kamala Failed To Hide Her Biggest Election Weakness From Voters

There is a steady theme following Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign like an anchor to a boat. She will likely lose the November election if she can’t break free.

If there was anything voters could take away from Harris’s CNN interview, it was her lack of compassion. Whether it was talking about the economic woes of the middle class or her foreign policy failures, it was apparent that she couldn’t connect with people on a human level, which is one of the most important aspects of running for president.

The number one issue people talk to me about is the economy and how it affects their daily lives, especially mothers. The price of healthy foods like butter, whole milk, eggs, and good proteins is much higher than it was three years ago. It’s hard for a family to outpace the yoke of inflation. (ROOKE: Kamala’s Campaign Crossed The Line, And Now She’s Paying The Price)

Some pollsters are seeing a momentous shift among voters, like black males, who have traditionally voted for the Democrat Party, because of the pain they feel from Biden-Harris’s economic policies. Former CNN host Don Lemon shocked MSNBC’s Jen Psaki that he’s seen a large number of black male voters say the terrible economy is why they plan to vote for former President Donald Trump in November.

When Harris tells Americans that she will protect/uplift/repair the middle class, as she did on CNN, but her emotions don’t convey an understanding of how badly they are hurting, it exposes her lack of care for these people. It’s crucial for voters to see that leaders understand their plight and are willing to fight for them. Harris fails to show that understanding and begs voters to believe that even though she is currently Vice President, there is nothing she can do immediately to fix it. (How Liberal Pollsters Are Recreating The 2016 Wave Of Silent Trump Voters)

Her lack of compassion only underscores to voters that she broke it once and will do it again.

Similarly, with the Gaza war, she is attempting to thread a political needle. Hamas is holding American citizens captive, and they have been for almost a year. When the news broke that terrorists killed six hostages, one being an American, Harris tweeted and made statements claiming that she and Biden have been working tirelessly to help these people.

However, when she had a chance to talk to the media, she ran past them. She had her wired headphones on, but as she walked up her plane’s steps, she brought her phone to her ear, seemingly pretending to be on a phone call. There is no greater example of her inability to project strength and compassion than her choice to ignore the press, knowing their questions would be about the hostages and the abject failure of the Biden-Harris Administration to help them.

The point of ignoring the press, who are almost completely on her side, is that she is more interested in making sure she isn’t on camera upsetting the anti-Israel sympathizers in swing states than she is in taking a stand against the captives holding American citizens hostage. Is earning Michigan’s electoral college votes really more important to her than rescuing Americans? Because that is what it looks like to voters. (ROOKE: The Moment The RFK Campaign Realized Trump Was Right About Everything)

Unlike Trump, who has an uncanny ability to connect with middle-class and blue-collar workers, Harris seems cold and unloving. She’s never had to worry about feeding her family or fighting authoritarianism. Her inability to portray this natural human emotion is obvious to voters looking for hope at the end of the last three years of hardship. Having her surrogates (Gov. Tim Walz, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, etc.) won’t be enough. Harris has to convey that compassion, or voters will continue to flock to Trump.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/03/rooke-kamala-weakness-honeymoon/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why AI ‘misinformation’ algorithms and research are mostly expensive garbage

If ever there was a case of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ then this is it.

And, ultimately it has all been driven by the objective of censoring information that does not fit the politically correct narrative.

The Hunter Biden laptop story is just one of many stories which were deemed by the Main Stream Media (and most academics) to be ‘misinformation‘ but which were subsequently revealed as true.

Indeed Mark Zukerberg has now admitted that Facebook (Meta), along with the other big tech companies, were pressured into censoring the story before the 2020 US election and also subsequently pressured by the Biden/Harris administration to censor stories about Covid which were wrongly classified as misinformation.

The problem is that the same kind of people who decided what was and was not misinformation (generally people on the political Left) were also the ones who were funded to produce AI algorithms to ‘learn’:

a) which people were ‘spreaders of misinformation’; and

b) what new claims were ‘misinformation’.

Between 2016 and 2022, I attended many research seminars in the UK on using AI and Machine Learning to ‘combat misinformation and disinfomation’.

From 2020, the example of Hunter Biden’s laptop was often used as a key ‘learning’ example, so algorithms classified it as ‘misinformation’ with subclassifications like ‘Russian propaganda’ or ‘conspiracy theory’.

Moreover, every presentation I attended invariably started with (and was dominated by) examples of ‘misinformation’ that were claimed to be based on “Trump lies” such as those among what the Washington Post claimed were the “30,573 false or misleading claims made by Trump over 4 years”.

But many of these supposed false or misleading claims were already known to be true to anybody outside of the Guardian/NYT/Washington Post reading bubble.

For example, they claimed that Trump said “Neo-Nazis and white supremacists were very fine people” and that anybody denying was pushing misinformation, whereas even the far Left-leaning Snopes had debunked that in 2017.

Similarly, they claimed “evidence that Biden had dementia” or that “Biden liked to smell the hair of young girls” was misinformation despite multiple videos showing exactly that – so, don’t believe your lying eyes; indeed as recently as one week before Biden’s dementia could no longer been hidden during his live Presidential debate performance, the mainstream media were adamant that such videos were misinformation ‘cheap tricks’.

But the academics presenting these Trump, Biden, and other political, examples ridiculed anybody who dared question the reliability of the self-appointed oracles who determined what was and was not misinformation. At one major conference taking place on zoom I posted in the chat:

“Is anybody who does not hate Trump welcome in this meeting”. The answer was “No. Trump supporters are not welcome and if you are one you should leave now”.

Sadly, most academics do not believe in freedom of thought, let alone freedom of expression when it comes to any views that challenge the ‘progressive’ narrative on anything.

In addition to the Biden and Trump related ‘misinformation’ stories which turned out to be true, there were also multiple examples of covid related stories (such as those claiming very low fatality rates and lack of effectiveness and safety of the vaccines) classified as misinformation that also turned out to be true.

In all these cases anybody pushing these stories was classified as a ‘spreader of misinformation’, ‘conspiracy theorist’ etc. And it is these kinds of assumptions which drive how the AI ‘misinformation’ algorithms that were developed and implemented by organisations like Facebook and Twitter worked.

Let me give a simplified example The algorithms generally start with a database of statements which are pre-classified as either ‘misinformation’ (even though many of which turned out to be true), or ‘not misinformation’ (even though many of which turned out to be false). For example, the following were classified as misinformation:

“Hunter Biden left a laptop with evidence of his criminal behaviour in a repair shop”

“The covid vaccines can cause serious injury and death”

The converse of any statement classified as ‘misinformation’ was classified as ‘not misinformation’.

A subset of these statements are used to “train” the algorithm and others to “test” the algorithm.

So, suppose the laptop statement is one of those used to train the algorithm and the vaccine statement is one of those used to test the algorithm.

Then, because the laptop satement is classified as misinformation, the algorithm learns that people who repost or like a tweet with the laptop statement are ‘misinformation spreaders’. Based on other posts these people make, the algorithm might additionally classify them as, for example, ‘far right’.

The algorithm is likely to find that some people already classified as ‘far right’ or ‘misinformation spreader’ – or people they are connected to – also post a statement like “The covid vaccines can cause serious injury and death”.

In that case the algorithm will have ‘learnt’ that this statement is most likely misinformation. And, hey presto, since it gives the ‘correct’ classification to the ‘test’ statement, the algorithm is ‘validated’.

Moreover, when presented with a new test statement such as “The covid vaccines do not stop infection from covid” (which was also pre-classified as ‘misinformation’) the algorithm will also ‘correctly learn’ that this is ‘misinformation’ because it has already ‘learnt’ that the statement.

“The covid vaccines can cause serious injury and death” is misinformation and that people who claimed the latter statement- or people connected with them – also claimed the former statement.

The way I have outlined how the AI process is designed to detect ‘misinformation’, is also the way that ‘world leading misinformation experts’ set up their experiment to “profile” the “personality type” that is susceptible to misinformation.

The same methods are also now used to profile and monitor people that the academic ‘experts’ claim are ‘far right’ or racist.

Hence, an enormous amount of research was (and is still) spent on developing ‘clever’ algorithms which simply censor the truth online or promote lies. Much of the funding for this research is justified on the grounds that ‘misinformation’ is now one of the greatest threats to international security.

Indeed, in Jan 2024 the Word Economic Forum declared that “misinformation and disinformation were the biggest short term global risks”.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also declared that “misinformation and disinformation are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change”. In the UK alone, the Government has provided many hundreds of millions of pounds of funding to numerous University research labs working on misinformation.

In March 2024 the Turing Institute alone (which has several dedicated teams working on this and closely related areas) was awarded £100 million of extra Government funding – it had already received some £700 million since its inception in 2015.

Somewhat ironically, the UK HM Government 2023 National Risk Register includes as a chronic risk:

“artificial intelligence (AI). Advances in AI systems and their capabilities have a number of implications spanning chronic and acute risks; for example, it could cause an increase in harmful misinformation and disinformation”

Yet it continues to prioritise research funding in AI to combat this increased risk of ‘harmful misinformation and disinformation’!

As Mike Benz has made clear in his recent work and interviews (backed up with detailed evidence), almost all of the funding for the Universities/research institutes world wide doing this kind of work, along with the ‘fact checkers’ that use it, comes from the US State Dept, NATO and the British Foreign Office who, in the wake of the Brexit vote and Trump election in 2016, were determined to stop the rise of ‘populism’ everywhere.

It is this objective which has driven the mad AI race to censor the internet.

https://principia-scientific.com/why-ai-misinformation-algorithms-and-research-are-mostly-expensive-garbage/

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Harris’s empty words an insult to US voters and democracy

Did you see that interview with Kamala Harris on CNN? Wasn’t it amazing?

As things stand, Harris, and her vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz, are marginally ahead in the presidential race. If the polls are accurate, and the election were held today, she’d probably be president. On the basis of the epic, fatuous emptiness of her first major television interview, this is a potentially disastrous development.

This column is no unqualified admirer of Donald Trump. America has presented itself with a terrible choice. But on the basis of that CNN interview, it stands ready to elect one of the most spectacularly incompetent and unqualified candidates in its history.

Of course, we must be careful about polls. Trump tends to outperform his poll numbers on election day. So it’s possible that even with the current opinion poll numbers, Trump could win.

The other paradox is that Trump leads Harris over who can better manage most of the key issues, but Harris leads Trump overall in the polls. In other words, a lot of people think Trump can do the job, but don’t like him much.

People are still unconvinced that Harris can do the job, but the Democrat machine, running a Hollywood movie star celebrity image promotion job, has marketed her as a likeable and normal American.

The CNN interview was unintentionally revealing. Harris, in striking contrast to professional politicians of the past such as Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, has avoided doing any unscripted interviews or live exchanges on camera. No one suggests she’s suffering cognitive decline like Joe Biden, but she is unbelievably hopeless at explaining her policies, or even just talking in sensible English about policy issues.

As Vice-President, she did a disastrous TV interview early in the life of the Biden administration, in which the interviewer was mean enough to ask some polite but modestly insistent questions about her performance in trying to clean up the illegal immigration disaster on the Mexican border.

She made such a mess of it that she virtually went into hiding afterwards, and was never again given primary responsibility for any serious issue by the Biden administration.

But back to the CNN show. The journalist, Dana Bash, did ask some of the obvious and mildly tough questions, but when Harris didn’t answer Bash didn’t press the matter. Instead there was a suffocating atmosphere of glutinous fluff.

Even on the softest possible questions, Harris had the greatest difficulty constructing a normal English language sentence that actually related to the question.

Bash asked Harris what she would do on day one of her presidency and got this reply: “Well, there are a number of things. I will tell you first and foremost one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class. When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward in a way that generations of Americans have been fuelled by – by hope and optimism.”

There followed another similar paragraph of mind-deadening word confetti about how Trump had caused divisions.

Bash was polite, but still no clearer on what Harris planned for day one, which is one the absolutely compulsory cliche questions of all American presidential campaigns. So she tried again. Day one?

Harris replied: “Day one, it’s gonna be about one, implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy. I’ve already laid out a number of proposals in that regard, which include what we’re gonna do to bring down the cost of everyday goods, what we’re gonna do to invest in America’s small businesses, what we’re gonna do to invest in families.”

Harris seems like the fictional portrayal of Sara Palin in the movie, Game Change. In that film her handlers couldn’t get Palin to fully grasp certain policy issues, so instead they got her to learn by rote a series of topic-specific answers.

It’s tempting to think Harris has done something similar, although it’s hard to believe anyone would actually write, and the get someone else to memorise, such content-free, syntax-mangling, meandering, pointless word assemblages as Harris uttered.

When later in the interview Harris was asked about the causes of inflation, the best she could come up with was alleged “price gouging” by greedy corporations. There was no mention of the budget deficit approaching $US2 trillion, more than 6 per cent of GDP. Nor of the vast regulatory complexity, and accompanying cost, the Biden administration has added to business.

Bash gently asked Harris why she had reversed herself on her passionate opposition, as recently as 2019, to fracking. She got no answer so asked again.

Harris replied: “Well, let’s be clear. My values have not changed. I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far.”

George Orwell could not have produced a more exquisite newspeak parody, the object of which is to give the appearance of substance to pure wind.

Consider one more immortal Harrisism, as to her radical policy reversals as she, temporarily at least, abandons her ultra-liberal past for a more centrist presentation for the election: “Dana, I think the – the – most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective is my values have not changed. You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed and I have worked on it that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”

There were also some wonderfully brazen straight-out lies. Did Biden offer to endorse you in the phone call when he told you he was standing down? Harris: “Well, my first thought was not about me, to be honest.”

Walz was if anything worse than Harris. Bash asked him about several blatant lies he’s told, for example claiming he carried weapons in battle whereas during his service in the National Guard he was never deployed anywhere near a battle zone. He responded, Prince Andrew-like, by praising his own exemplary honesty.

CNN did the right thing asking these questions. But Bash responded to the non-answers as if she’d heard a masterful declamation from Cicero. CNN certainly decided not to make an issue of lies or evasions.

Harris’s handlers are hoping she can be anything any voter wants, that she can win just by not being Trump.

That’s partly why they won’t define her program or let her define herself. But refusing to outline any policies, refusing to engage in any serious debate, that’s an insult to democracy. In her own way, Harris embodies the serious, hopefully temporary, decline of America’s political culture.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/harriss-empty-words-an-insult-to-us-voters-and-democracy/news-story/3174b09b12862ad785dc40877a1e04bd

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Elon Musk Leads Parade of Tech Titans Boosting Trump as the True ‘Freedom Candidate’

A shocking partisan switch is underway in the stratosphere of the tech titans: The industry known for its wokeness is betting big bucks on a Republican.

Last month former President Donald Trump gave a thumbs up to the notion of teaming up with billionaire innovator Elon Musk if he wins in November. Hours later, Musk posted a message on X: “I am willing to serve.”

Elon Musk for commerce secretary? Or perhaps for the newly created position of free speech czar?

Whether or not Musk actually joins a Trump administration—Trump himself said Sunday that the mogul is likely too busy to do so but could “consult”—his bold steps to back the Republican signal a turnaround.

Musk voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. Yet last month he launched a pro-Trump super PAC, which he and several other tech moguls are funding—even though Trump would likely remove federal subsidies for electric vehicles, a major Musk industry, if he wins a second term.

Investor and “Shark Tank” star Mark Cuban called the phenomenon of tech bosses boosting Trump “insane.”

Not really: While Democrats strove mightily last week to push “freedom” as the theme of their convention, tech leaders are betting that freedom of speech, freedom to innovate and freedom from crushing government regulations and confiscatory taxes are more likely in a Trump reign than in a Kamala Harris administration.

Among those Silicon Valley heavyweights is Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate.

“I would say that I trust the future of this country more under the leadership of Trump … than I do of the Harrises,” Shanahan said last week as Kennedy weighed his decision to back Trump in the race.

Harris’ economic plans, Shanahan warned—”particularly her flawed ideas about price caps on food”—echo “the very policies that caused the famine my family suffered through in Mao’s Communist China.”

The Republican National Committee’s platform, dictated largely by Trump himself, pledges lower taxes and deregulation, and describes innovators as national treasures.

In contrast, the Democrats’ 2024 platform vilifies businesses as greedy profiteers who don’t pay “their fair share” and proposes hiking corporate taxes to 28% and raising taxes on capital gains.

Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said in December that it would decide which presidential ticket to support based on one issue: “If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.” The firm called “bad government policies” the No. 1 threat to their industry.

Trump has expressed his enthusiasm for new technologies, even promising to “make America first in AI.”

By July, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the investment firm’s principals, had changed sides and endorsed Trump, saying the Republican will reduce regulation and lower taxes.

When Trump chose running mate J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist with Silicon Valley experience, tech entrepreneurs applauded.

PayPal founder David Sacks is throwing his support to Trump and even spoke at the Republican National Convention. Palantir Technologies cofounder Joe Lonsdale and cryptocurrency kings Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are donating to Musk’s America PAC to back Trump.

Of course, tech is an industry like any other, concerned with what government can do to damage the business environment.

Expect more tech leaders to change sides if Harris and running mate Tim Walz roll out policy proposals as misguided as those we’ve seen so far, like price controls.

Big tech reacts to bad economic policies at every level, not just federal.

The same political metamorphosis bringing tech figures to Trump is also causing thousands of firms to flee California’s high taxes and overbearing regulations, and relocate to Texas. They’re trading woke for business-friendly.

Austin, the state capital, has become a tech hub dubbed Silicon Hills. Musk recently moved his company SpaceX to Texas and announced that X’s headquarters will soon follow.

Yet Musk is more than a Silicon Valley titan—he is also a crusader for free speech.

Last month he stared down a European Union bureaucrat who objected that Musk’s uncensored two-hour conversation with Trump on X could result in “disinformation.”

“Take a big step back,” Musk responded via a cheeky meme, after blasting the bureaucrat for his “alarming disregard for freedom of expression,” as a letter from several free speech groups put it.

Musk recently closed X in Brazil rather than comply with government censors there. X is suspended in Venezuela for refusing to take down posts challenging dictator Nicolas Maduro’s phony victory claims.

Ending government censorship is a top Republican priority. The Biden-Harris administration has used agencies from the FBI to the Department of Health and Human Services to pressure social media to do the administration’s bidding. The RNC platform pledges that federal interference will stop.

Musk wants “to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” naming meritocracy and free speech among the core ideas his America PAC is pushing.

They’re not on Harris’ agenda—more reasons tech money is moving to Trump.

You don’t need AI to figure that out.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/01/elon-musk-leads-parade-of-tech-titans-boosting-trump-as-the-true-freedom-candidate/

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Food Profit Margins Shrink, But Harris Blames Them for Rising Grocery Bills

Rising grocery costs continue to put the squeeze on families. Overall, the cost of a trip to fill the pantry rose nearly 22 percent since the beginning of 2021. Many specific staples rose far more—eggs are up 110 percent, flour up 29 percent, orange juice up 82 percent. A family of four spending $1000 per month just three and a half years is spending an additional $2,640 annually for this same shopping list.

Unfortunately, Vice President Harris misdiagnosed the source of the problem as “bad actors” seeing their “highest profits in two decades.” She blames the initial surge in food prices on supply chain issues during the pandemic—certainly a major contribution to the shortages and price increases on many items early in the pandemic.

However, Harris mixes this truth with falsehood by claiming businesses are now pocketing the savings after these supply-chain issues have subsided. Her proposed solution—“the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food”—will compound the misery.

First, the faulty diagnosis. A look at the data easily counters this.

An insightful way of analyzing whether price increases are due to “gouging” is to focus on the variable production costs of the goods sold plus the selling, general, and administrative expenses. Tyson Foods—the world’s largest chicken, beef, and pork processor—saw its margin drop from 8.4 percent in 2020 to just 1.1 percent last year. Kraft Heinz and General Mills—food processors with combined revenue nearly equal to Tyson Foods, suffered similar results. Kraft Heinz’s margin declined from 21.4 percent to 20.2 percent. General Mills’s shrank from 17.8 percent to 16.8 percent. Far from “gouging,” these industry leaders are failing to fully pass along the entirety of their own cost surges to consumers. Expenses relative to sales increased during the past three and a half years of elevated inflation.

After accounting for all expenses—including extraordinary items, taxes, and interest—margins are even tighter. Notably, Tyson Foods experienced a net profit margin last year of NEGATIVE 1.23 percent. Kraft Heinz realized a 10.72 percent net profit margin last year, and General Mills a 12.91 percent margin.

What about industry-wide? Profit margins are shrinking as food manufacturing costs rose 28.4 percent since January 2020, exceeding the 26.3 percent retail price hikes on food items. Grocery store profit margins sank to 1.6 percent in 2023, the third consecutive year of decline after peaking at 3.0 percent in 2020.

In other words, grocer profit on $100 of sales is just $1.60. Profit margins contracted as overall food inflation totaled 20.6 percent in those three years. The biggest grocers have experienced this margin crunch. The Kroger Co.—the nation’s largest traditional supermarket—eked out an operating margin of 1.93 percent this past year, a margin lower now than it was pre-pandemic. These trends are the opposite of gouging.

History provides endless proof that prices set by governments under the market price results in shortages. Demand expands as supply shrinks. What good is a lower price if the shelves become empty?

Venezuela, Cuba, and the Soviet Union provide ample examples of the dangers of price controls. But the United States embarked on its own failed experiment just five decades ago. In August 1971, President Nixon ordered an initial 90-day freeze on prices and labor, with future price increases to be subject to federal approval. The proposal initially proved wildly popular, with 75 percent public support and a landslide re-election the following year. President Nixon even ordered an IRS audit on companies breaching the ceiling.

Ultimately, the program ended in disaster. As explained by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, “Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.” In April 1974, the administration dismantled most of the program.

Importantly, the inflation of the early 1970s resulted largely from easy money. From the beginning of 1970 through the demise of the price-fixing program in April 1974, the M2 money supply expanded by 48 percent. In less than four years, prices rose by nearly 27 percent. In other words, prices jumped in fewer than five years by an amount equivalent to that of the entire prior decade!

Does this sound familiar? It should. The inflationary surge of the post-COVID era is largely a direct result of the explosion of government spending beginning in 2020. The Federal Reserve financed much of this spending by ginning up its digital printing presses to purchase government bonds alongside a myriad of other assets—from mortgage-backed securities to corporate debt.

The flood of new money coursed through the economy. The M2 money supply swelled by 40 percent in just two years. More dollars chasing goods and services ultimately resulted in dramatic price hikes.

Harris appears to have forgotten the important lessons from this episode. Based on her insistence that price gouging is responsible for high grocery prices—when it clearly is not—the Vice President’s proposal would more likely function as a price freeze or command pricing. As such, the existence of state laws currently prohibiting dramatic price increases during emergencies should not assuage concerns about Harris’s proposal. Of course, even these state laws may result in the unintended consequence of shortages—but these temporary interventions in the market are rarely activated.

With deficits looming even larger in the years ahead, the threat that the central bank will finance this spending with another bond purchasing spree only increases. The food production industry is not immune from the ravages of this reckless monetary policy: the spiral of rising labor costs, insurance, and equipment. In addition, the sector is particularly sensitive to the assault on affordable fuel vital to the cultivation and transportation of food.

It’s time political leaders admit their own culpability in the shrinking purchasing power of the dollar at the grocery store. Blaming painful price increases on the very entities responsible for the most bountiful, readily accessible supply of sustenance in human history is woefully misleading. Imposing price controls is a demagogic solution harmful to farmers, processors, grocers, and families.

https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/commentary/food-profit-margins-shrink-harris-blames-them-rising-grocery-bills

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BAN LIFTED

The ban on "Australian Politics" has now been lifted. So I now am postng to it again at its old blogspot site:

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com

Kamala: $5 Trillion in New Taxes

Kamala Harris’ economic plan is taking shape, starting with $5 trillion in new taxes—because Washington clearly does not have enough money to spend

In the past fortnight alone, Harris has promised to hike taxes on small businesses to 39.6% and hike taxes on capital gains and dividends to a top rate of 44.6%—the highest in history, even beating the communist-adjacent Jimmy Carter.

Since taxing half your life savings doesn’t come close to keeping Washington fed, she also wants to hike the corporate rate by a third to 28%. That would take us from one of the best places in the world to do business to one of the worst. We’d be worse than China, Canada, Britain, Russia, even the European Union.

A company would literally make money moving to Canada. And for so-called strategic sectors, our tax rate would be double the rate in China.

Note that workers are the ones who actually pay corporate income tax. A Tax Foundation study found that they pay around 70% of them in the form of lower wages. The rest is paid by shareholders in lower retirement returns and customers in higher prices. Yes, the same high prices she’s blaming on “price gouging.”

The fun doesn’t stop there.

Harris is also calling for a second death tax, something called “step-up basis” that would treat death as a taxable event. So, not only would the family business or farm have to pay estate taxes when it’s passed on, it would be taxed as if all the assets were sold, with up to 44.6% going to the government on top of the death tax.

Finally, the big one: Harris’ handlers are pushing for something we’ve never taxed in this country: unrealized gains. As in a bureaucrat pretends you sold all your stock and the family farm when you didn’t and sends you a bill anyway.

Like all new taxes, this one is being sold as only hitting the rich, but in reality, it will hit family businesses and farms. Moreover, I mentioned in a recent video how the income tax itself started by only hitting the top 1% at a top rate of 7%—and yet here we are today, with more tax returns than people in this country and a top rate of—if Harris gets her way—44.6%.

Incidentally, Americans overwhelmingly oppose taxes on unrealized gains by a factor of 3 to 1. Seventy-six percent of independents oppose it.

It’s also worth noting Europeans have tried this kind of wealth tax over and over, and every time, it’s failed. The actual rich just move their money and hire better tax lawyers, while small business gets wiped out. Norway, for example, expected to collect $150 million per year from its wealth tax, but instead $54 billion fled the country, taking $600 million of taxes with it.

So, what’s next?

Barely a month into Harris’ presidential candidacy, she’s already far to the left of even President Joe Biden. And keep in mind, this is before the election, when they try not to sound crazy.

We can only imagine what’s coming after the election.

Like drinking radiator coolant, government spending always tastes sweet in the beginning. The stimulus checks, the trillion dollars for green energy, and this week’s war are all painless blips on a debt chart.

Then comes the payback: First, the inflation; then, the taxes that amount to wholesale confiscation of your retirement, of a financial future for the young—all while gutting what’s left of the productive economy.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/28/kamala-trillion-new-taxes/

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CNN’s Softball Interview of Kamala Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris’ very first interview of her campaign aired on CNN Thursday night.

We waited a month and a half for this and Harris’ much anticipated debut ended up containing barely more substance than the policy section of her website. (Don’t search too long for that section; it doesn’t exist.)

The interview began with a glowing montage resembling a movie trailer, settled in with a few tough questions, and ended with a whole lot of meaningless fluff. There were a few word salads mixed in for flavor.

CNN anchor Dana Bash did press Harris on a handful of her long list of flip flops.

She asked Harris why she changed her policy on fracking. In 2019, Harris said that she was in favor of banning fracking. Here she is saying so.

Now she says she no longer backs the ban on fracking. What changed?

Harris couldn’t articulate a particular reason. She said that climate change is real and that the current administration is doing a good job of hitting climate goals, so she won’t do it.

“What I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking,” she said.

The vice president was also asked about the record illegal border crossings since she and President Joe Biden ascended to the White House. Bash noted that she was tasked with solving the “root causes” of illegal immigration from Central America.

This is when Harris was the border czar, a phrase the media has desperately attempted to erase from history.

Harris answered that what she did to address the root causes of illegal immigration has “resulted in a number of benefits, including historic investments by American businesses in that region. The number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we’ve began that work.”

She then said it was actually former President Donald Trump who was against border security and that she and Biden were all for the Senate border bill that failed to pass in February.

That bill would have done little to stop the flow of illegal immigration and was largely stuffed with funding for the war in Ukraine to boot.

Bash later followed up with a softball question—asked in the form of a wink, wink answer—about how voters should respond to her shifting sands policy positions.

“How should voters look at some of the changes you’ve made that you explained some of here in your policy?” Bash asked before giving Harris multiple-choice options to respond with. “Because you’ve had more experience now and you have learned more about the information? Is it running for president in a Democratic primary? And should they feel comfortable and confident that what you say now is going to be your policy moving forward?”

Harris fumbled her response anyway with a meandering non-answer but insisted that her values have stayed the same. Take a listen.

Ah, so we’re supposed to believe that while Harris’ policy positions have largely changed in just a few years, her principles remain timeless. But are those values left-wing, moderate, populist, or what? She didn’t explain.

Those were the high points of the interview. There’s little else to say about the policy substance. I suggest you read my colleague Virginia Allen’s fact check of the handful of substantial questions Harris was asked.

Harris notably brought her dad, I mean her running mate Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., along with her. He didn’t do much and just kind of sat there like a chaperone.

Walz was asked a question about his alleged stolen valor and why he made false statements about being a war veteran.

“You said that you carried weapons in war, but you have never deployed actually in a war zone. A campaign official said that you misspoke. Did you?” Bash asked.

The Minnesota governor didn’t really answer. Walz just said that he’s proud of his service, and that he has poor grammar.

After that there really isn’t much to tell in this edited, 27-minute performance.

Harris was asked about the day Biden dropped out of the race which gave her the chance to tell a whimsical story about puzzles and making bacon when she got the phone call. Walz and Harris were questioned about what enchanted them about the DNC. And Harris was given a moment to talk about a picture of her niece watching her accept the nomination.

These are clearly the issues voters care about.

What we learned from this is that the Harris campaign clearly intends to test the outer limits of how much the media and this regime can simply manufacture a presidency.

Harris’ performance Thursday night wasn’t awful. It was just flat and shallow. She gave cookie cutter, not particularly clarifying. answers to serious questions about governing philosophy.

And it’s hard to say that the American people learned much at all other than that Harris held some policies, then she didn’t, she thinks Biden is a great and wonderful president, but she’s new and fresh.

The question Harris was never really asked and generally didn’t answer was this: Why should she be the president? What does she think she will bring to the White House that would make her an effective commander-in-chief? Why should we think she will be anything more than a lifeless caretaker president like her predecessor?

Harris may be more lucid than Biden at this point, but mere lucidity shouldn’t be the only qualification to be president.

The closest Harris got to answering this question of why she should be president is when she said in her talk about her niece, “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans.”

That’s not a bad answer for someone running to be class president, but doesn’t really explain to the American people why a candidate who simply got dropped into this race at the last second should become the leader of the free world.

CNN asked a handful of tough questions, but failed to follow up, and left the American people without answers about what Harris actually stands for.

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UK: Here’s an opinion poll you might have missed.

A few days ago, YouGov asked British people whether they would support or oppose increasing deportations of illegal migrants. The results speak for themselves.

More than two-thirds of the country, 67%, would support increasing deportations, rising to 92% among Conservatives and 96% among Reformers.

It’s a reminder of how ordinary people are thinking and feeling, and how the ‘pro-immigration position’ is routinely only represented by 15-20%.

Why am I showing you this?

Because this issue also lies at the heart of something else in British politics that is about to heat up dramatically: the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party, a party that at the general election last month was very nearly destroyed.

Put simply, if there’s one issue more than any other that will determine whether the Conservative Party comes off life support and recovers then it is immigration.

This was the primary reason why millions of disillusioned conservatives abandoned the party for Nigel Farage and Reform’s tougher measures, and has since become the most important issue for ALL people in the country, eclipsing the economy.

And make no mistake: this is also the most important leadership election in the modern history of the Conservative Party.

Why? Because if they get this right they could, perhaps, fend off Nigel Farage and Reform. But if they get this wrong then they will continue their death spiral.

If the Tories elect somebody who is credible and competent on immigration then they might at least stand a chance of survival; but if they elect somebody who is weak and deferential to the status-quo then they will essentially be creating the biggest opening for Nigel Farage that the leader of Reform has ever had.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/where-conservative-party-leadership?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=858965&post_id=148295144&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3vtk7t&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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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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