Monday, September 16, 2024
Trump’s road map for taking ‘woke’ out of American education
Donald Trump is vowing to take what he describes as wokeness out of America’s schools if he is elected president. He and allies have a road map for doing so.
The former president has said he would deploy federal powers to pressure schools and universities that he considers to be too liberal. One strategy that he has described would launch civil-rights investigations of schools that have supported transgender rights and racial diversity programs. Another tactic would use the college accreditation system, which sets standards for schools, to scale back diversity goals.
Conservatives have previously decried the use of federal agencies – sometimes derisively called the “deep state” – by Democrats. Now, Trump and his allies have suggested they want to turn the tables.
Unlike many of Trump’s other education proposals — including punishing schools that require vaccines, creating an anti-”woke” online university, and instituting “universal school choice” — these new tactics wouldn’t require state or congressional cooperation. They would likely kick up a legal fight, from school systems, universities and LGBTQ advocates, among others.
In speeches, Trump has also repeatedly pledged to abolish the Education Department.
Trump representatives pointed to his campaign website when asked for further details.
Critical race theory targeted
“Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs,” Trump said in a campaign video earlier this year. “We will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory.” Conservatives have used the term “critical race theory” as a catch-all for liberal ideas about race.
Trump’s platform promises to investigate “any school that engages in race-based discrimination,” though it doesn’t specify which programs he would target.
Several common practices in schools might be subject to scrutiny, said R. Shep Melnick, a professor at Boston College who has studied civil-rights law. Those could include initiatives focused on helping Black or Hispanic students succeed in class; diversity offices that cater mainly to non-white student groups; and lessons on white privilege.
Since last year’s Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, conservatives have brought lawsuits against race-conscious access programs that they say discriminate against white and Asian people.
The threat of an investigation can be as effective as an actual inquiry, according to legal analysts. A few high-profile cases could cause many institutions to change their practices.
“There’s a chilling effect here that cannot be understated,” said Jasmine Bolton, a former civil-rights lawyer in the Biden administration’s Education Department.
‘Transgender insanity’ and Title IX
The Biden administration has interpreted Title IX — the 1972 law that bars sex-based discrimination in educational institutions — to protect transgender people, too. (This rule has been halted by courts in much of the country.)
By contrast, Trump has criticised what he describes as “transgender insanity” in schools. He has suggested that he would flip the Biden’s interpretation of Title IX to say that certain accommodations for transgender people would amount to sex-based discrimination. Trump’s campaign site says he would use the law to bar “men from participating in women’s sports.” In 2020, the Trump administration threatened to pull federal funding from some Connecticut schools over a policy allowing transgender girls to play on female sports teams. Upon taking office, the Biden administration dropped the effort.
Sarah Parshall Perry, a former Trump administration Education Department official and a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said a Title IX violation could occur “when we find biological girls” losing access to “privacy or private spaces,” such as when transgender students use bathrooms or locker rooms aligned with their stated gender identity.
Accreditation as a ‘secret weapon’ Conservatives have criticised accreditation agencies — which set standards for colleges and control access to federal student-aid dollars — as being meddlesome, particularly in campus diversity initiatives.
The agencies are granted recognition by the Education Department, with the help of an advisory committee. Some have called on schools to close gaps in minority graduation rates, or explicitly support the concept of equity.
Trump has signalled intentions to give schools more wiggle room on diversity efforts by up-ending that accreditation system, a tactic he has called his “secret weapon.” Analysts have said such a move could include stripping recognition from some agencies, approving more alternatives, or loosening their watchdog mandates.
Michael Poliakoff, a member of the accreditation advisory committee, and head of the conservative-leaning non-profit American Council of Trustees and Alumni, called accreditors “intrusive” and “micromanaging” and said they have grown overly prescriptive.
Poliakoff’s group served on the advisory board of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, considered by many conservatives as a blueprint for the next administration, although Trump has disavowed it.
The Education Department under Trump limited accreditors’ oversight authority in 2019, including by allowing colleges to get approval from accreditors outside their regions.
Legal fights ahead A new Trump Education Department might face legal hurdles. The Supreme Court recently stopped giving agencies, such as the Education Department, broad leeway in interpreting federal law. Future high-court decisions on transgender rights and race-based policies could affect how the next administration enforces civil-rights law.
Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest, said he is troubled by Trump’s education promises and would be willing to fight them in court. The district receives hundreds of millions in federal dollars.
“We would pursue every opportunity available to us to defend, to protect, to assert the rights of our students,” he said. “I think that we would not be alone in this.”
*************************************************************
Independent and Undecided Voters Largely Aligning with Trump Post-Debate
Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump has been touted as either a draw or a Harris victory by mainstream media pundits, but Independent and undecided voters saw the evening differently. Multiple polls are showing that a majority of undecided voters either decided on backing Trump or leaned towards that decision following the debate. Reuters conducted interviews with a focus group of 10 undecided voters, six of whom said that they would support Trump following the debate. Only three said they would back Harris, while a final voter was still undecided.
“Harris and Trump are in a tight race and the election will likely be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, many of whom are swing voters like the undecided voters who spoke to Reuters,” the news agency noted. “The Trump converts said they trusted him more on the economy, even though all said they did not like him as a person. They said their personal financial situation had been better when he was president between 2017-2021,” Reuters continued, adding, “Four of those six also said Harris did not convince them she would pursue different economic policies than Democratic President Joe Biden, a Democrat they largely blame for the high cost of living.”
Most of the undecided voters interviewed by Reuters said that Harris spent too much time attacking Trump and was “vague” on her own policies. “I still don’t know what she is for. There was no real meat and bones for her plans,” 61-year-old Floridian Mark Kadish told Reuters. Robert Wheeler, a 48-year-old Nevadan, told Reuters that he had been leaning towards Harris prior to the debate but decided on Trump after watching the vice president’s performance. “I felt like the whole debate was Kamala Harris telling me why not to vote for Donald Trump instead of why she’s the right candidate,” Wheeler commented.
The New York Times also interviewed a slate of undecided voters, most of whom were unimpressed with Harris’s showing on debate night. Most voters said that Harris “did not seem much different from Mr. Biden,” and while they acknowledged that Harris “laid out a sweeping vision to fix some of the country’s most stubborn problems,” she offered no details or “fine print” regarding how she would achieve that vision.
While most undecided voters named by NYT simply remained undecided following the debate, a number skewed in favor of Trump. Keilah Miller, a 34-year-old black woman living in Milwaukee, said she had been leaning toward Harris but was disappointed by the vice president’s debate performance. “Trump’s pitch was a little more convincing than hers. I guess I’m leaning more on his facts than her vision,” Miller said. “When Trump was in office — not going to lie — I was living way better. I’ve never been so down as in the past four years. It’s been so hard for me.”
Voter analysis from Fox News also found that Independent voters supported Trump’s positions, expressed in the debate, on immigration and the economy. Even Democrats liked what Trump had to say about taxes, jobs, and inflation. Pollster Lee Carter told Fox News, “Independents are tracking very much with Republicans. They’re looking for a couple of things. They’re looking for answers on immigration, they’re looking for answers on the economy. They want to hear that things will get better for them and they also want change from what is happening right now.” Carter continued, “One of the most important things they were looking for last night from Kamala Harris is how are you going to make it different?”
A post-debate poll from CNN found that while a majority (63%) of voters said that Harris did better overall, Trump performed better on issues of the greatest importance to voters. Trump garnered a 20-point lead (55% to 35%) over Harris when voters were asked who would do better on economic issues, and an even-wider 23-point lead (56% to 33%) on immigration issues. Trump was also ranked a better “commander-in-chief” (49% to 43%) than Harris.
As polling data comes trickling in, Harris has requested a second debate against Trump. So far, the 45th president has refused to commit to a second debate, posting on Truth Social, “In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’ Well, it’s no different with a Debate.” Trump added, “She was beaten badly last night… so why would I do a Rematch?”
*************************************************
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)
***********************************************
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Exposing Chameleon Kamala Harris and the great US debate con job
Kamala Harris is attempting to win the US presidency via the most audacious identity theft in modern politics, as evidenced in her essentially preposterous performance in the debate with Donald Trump.
If Harris wins it will be a Harry Houdini moment of escapology, a politician escaping a lifetime’s ideological commitment and political values to campaign as somebody else entirely.
Except on abortion, where she’s making a strong and effective counter-proposal to Trump, Harris spent the debate both lying about Trump, just as he lied about her, and also ditching many of the policies and values that have defined her life and career.
Harris has been a strong advocate of gun control, including mandatory gun buybacks. But in the debate she declared: “Tim Walz (her vice-presidential running mate) and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”
She’s critical of Trump’s proposal for new tariffs, but as Trump pointed out, she and Biden kept all the tariffs he imposed during his first term and added some more. Are Trump tariffs bad, Biden/Harris tariffs good?
She’s been a super-keen green machine politician, net zero all the way, phase out fossil fuel, but quickly, and, until 2020, dead against fracking. Now she loves fracking.
Even more astonishing were her boasts: “I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking.” Similarly, she and Biden oversaw “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history” and “the US must reduce its dependence on foreign oil”. She also boasted the US now produced more gas than ever before.
All this is a bizarre turnaround, and surely equals Trump’s many policy flip-flops.
The official position of the Biden administration is to phase out fossil fuels, not produce record amounts of them. The only reason the Inflation Reduction Act had provision for three new offshore oil and gas leases is because Joe Manchin, the retiring conservative Democrat senator from West Virginia, refused to vote for the act and its attendant five-year plan otherwise.
The Biden administration fought Manchin’s initiative, but gave in because there was no other way to get the legislation passed. So Harris is boasting about championing provisions she strongly opposed.
That’s chutzpah.
Had the debate moderators had the slightest interest in consistency, they would have fact-checked Harris on this, or on the many straight-out lies she told.
She said Trump left office with the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. That’s just untrue. The unemployment rate when Trump left office was 6 per cent. That’s nowhere near the highest level since the Great Depression.
Don’t get me wrong. Trump told loads of lies himself. He claimed, for example, that inflation under Biden was the worst in America’s history. That’s absolute nonsense. At its highest point under Biden, inflation was way below levels in the 1980s and the 1920s.
Harris in the past championed decriminalising illegal entry into the US. Now she styles herself a tough border enforcer. Previously, she favoured cutting defence spending. Now she pledges to the US having the strongest, “most lethal” military in the world. She once opposed private health insurance, now she’s all for it. There are countless other examples of Harris abandoning a solid left-wing past for what are almost notional centre-right positions.
To some extent, this is just the normal jigging and jagging of democratic politics, vastly exaggerated. To adapt Bismarck, politics is like a sausage. If you want to enjoy eating it, don’t look too closely at how it’s made.
However, the dynamics of the presidential debate, and the election generally, which is still desperately balanced and way too close to call, reveal deeper structural dynamics in US politics and society that have not been fully recognised.
For a start, Harris’s new positions indicate that on many points of policy and ideology, Trump has won the argument. Trump is probably the least intellectual of any modern US major party presidential candidate. Yet he has in several areas not only disrupted, but revolutionised the accepted wisdom on key policy positions.
Both sides of US politics now view China essentially the way Trump does, as America’s single most formidable and dangerous strategic competitor.
Harris had almost nothing to say about climate change, and certainly no mention at all of that nebulous security blanket, the rules-based international order, but she did want America “to win the competition with China”. Similarly, as outlined above, for the moment at least she’s embraced Trumpian energy policy. She’s newly tough on the border with Mexico. She doesn’t like Trump’s new tariffs but loves his old ones and wants to use tariffs and industry policy to repatriate manufacturing jobs to America.
Second, Harris is receiving lavish, in my view almost wholly unjustified, praise for her debate performance because her supporters feel she disconcerted and discomfited Trump.
Not for substance. Pay attention to the customarily savage dog that hasn’t barked. Harris can turn on a dime to embrace Trump-lite positions on illegal immigration, guns, defence, China, even Israel, and there’s no blowback from the left.
Of course, she plans big tax increases on corporations and the rich, which Trump certainly doesn’t favour. But just the statement that as president she would always ensure Israel has the means to defend itself would have been enough to earn Biden the epithet “Genocide Joe” and would be regarded as one step from fascist militarism from Trump.
But Harris gets a clear pass. This is partly because the left of the Democratic Party, and American society generally, doesn’t believe a word of Harris’s new centrism, and thinks if she becomes president she’ll govern as a committed progressive.
That’s the likely reaction of many working-class voters in Pennsylvania and other Midwestern battleground states. If you really want a pro-fracking, gun-toting, oil drilling, border-controlling president, is Kamala Harris your pick?
Harris has stolen some of Trump’s clothes, but she looks weird in them.
The lack of left-wing blowback to Harris’s sharp rightward tilt in the debate offers a clue to another element of America’s deep social and political polarisation. Both sides of US politics have convinced themselves that the other side is so inherently, quintessentially, at its very core, evil, that anything goes in defeating them.
When Trump first emerged, he did break numerous norms that hadn’t been broken before, especially in the way he lied and abused people. Democrats are now convinced Trump is uniquely evil in the history of America. In fact, Democrats demonised George W Bush and Ronald Reagan in similar fashion, though less intensely.
But Democrats and their media backers have got into such a moral panic over Trump that they now fully equal him in their own norm-breaking, such as through politicised legal prosecutions, politicised mis-use of intelligence agencies, rank unprofessionalism amid much media, and much more.
For the bulk of the American left, Harris telling brazen lies, and adopting positions at odds with everything she and they believe in, (which she’s likely to drop 10 minutes after election), is acceptable because it serves the higher purpose of defeating Trump.
What’s a white lie, or a phony policy, compared with stopping the greatest threat to democracy in American history, after all?
Trump and his supporters are just as bad and have their own ends-justify-means apologies for Trump’s lies and excesses. Their version of the syndrome has it that America is failing, enduring a uniquely dangerous moment, because of the politics-as-usual Washington swamp, led by left-wing Democrats.
That’s why both sides of US politics see the same debate in such radically different ways. For Trump supporters, there was just the usual bit of Trump linguistic imprecision and overstatement in a noble battle to save America. For Harris supporters, a fine leader may need to stoop to dissembling and verbal gymnastics to preserve democracy itself.
Both sides see themselves fighting a moral crusade of purpose that involves moral compromise of methods. In reality, the two sides of politics are routinely behaving worse than at any stage in more than half a century.
This also reflects the culture. Reality has become fluid, the culture plastic. Social media, with its toxic fantasies, is ubiquitous. No one believes in objective truth. There’s no cultural penalty for lying.
The big issue where Harris confronts Trump with strong disagreement is abortion. Harris told numerous lies about this issue during the debate and in her Democratic Convention conference speech. She claims Trump plans a national ban on abortion. That’s not true. Trump has been consistent in wanting the issue resolved, democratically through legislatures and referendums, at the state level. Harris claims Trump wants to limit the availability of IVF fertility treatments. Also not true. Trump has promised to have all IVF treatments paid for by the federal government, or by mandated insurance companies.
Harris and Biden, on the other hand, take the most liberal position regarding abortion law, believing there should be no legal restrictions at all. Many state Republican legislatures, following the overturning of the Roe v Wade ruling, and the subsequent Supreme Court decisions which further liberalised the law, are imposing, or trying to impose, abortion restrictions.
Conservatives have had a bitter experience over abortion politics since Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022. Conservatives long argued that the intensely divisive abortion issue, in which both sides passionately and conscientiously believe they’re defending fundamental human rights, should not be decided by courts but by the democratic political process.
In 1973, when Roe was decided, the courts were more liberal on abortion than the society. Not now. A big majority of Americans, it seems, are substantially if not completely laissez-faire on abortion. This shatters a familiar conservative myth, that there is a vast silent majority of social conservatives in society who are manacled by government rulings and regulations, and if liberated to vote on an issue will generally vote conservative.
This is true on some issues, but absolutely wrong on others. It’s certainly wrong on abortion. A better social issue for conservatives politically was the Supreme Court ending race-based affirmative action. This resulted from a legal case brought by Asian students against discrimination in favour of African-American students. Like the Australian referendum vote against the voice, it wasn’t born of racial hostility but of a desire to affirm universal citizenship and diminish, if not abolish, the divisive civic role of race.
There could be two Supreme Court vacancies in the next presidential term, which provides a huge motive for conservatives to work for Trump’s election.
So who will win?
At time of writing the RealClearPolitics poll average has Harris fractionally leading Trump, 48.4 to 47.3. Tellingly, on that vote, RCP has Trump winning the presidency in the Electoral College, by the tight margin of 281 to 257 (270 Electoral College votes are needed for the presidency). Just before the debate, a New York Times/Sienna poll put Trump 1 per cent ahead. Just after the debate, Policymarket has the race at 50/50.
The Economist/YouGov and Pew polls also call a dead heat. A number of polls have Harris slightly ahead. The RCP average may understate Trump because it includes some polls before the Harris bubble deflated a bit.
Harris is seen as the debate winner, though watching it I thought it a low-performance functional draw or even that Trump might have won narrowly. It’s unlikely to change votes hugely. Biden’s disastrous debate performance only resulted in a very slight drop in his vote. It was all the Democrats demanding he stand down that hurt his numbers more.
Harris got a big bounce from Biden withdrawing and her becoming the candidate, but no bounce at all from the Democratic National Convention. She has rigidly avoided interviews and even in 17 minutes of soft ball tripe from CNN managed to look meandering and vacant. She certainly did better in the debate.
Conventional wisdom thinks Harris needs a 51 or 52 per cent poll vote to be safely assured of victory.C There’s a small rural bias in the Electoral College (resulting from small states having as many senators as large states) which favours Republicans, but this isn’t the main reason Democrats sometimes win more votes but lose the presidency. Rather, Democrats win by huge margins in California and New York, while Republicans win by smaller margins in Texas and Florida. It’s like a parliamentary system. A party can “waste” votes in safe states.
Only seven battleground states are in play – Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada. All other states are spoken for. The battleground states are almost all nearly dead even, with Harris having a small edge in Michigan and Wisconsin. RCP’s Electoral College model with Trump winning 281 to 257 has Harris winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada, but Trump winning all the other battleground states. If everything else stayed the same and he lost either Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Georgia, he’d lose the election.
It’s desperately close. This could even explain Trump’s bizarre “illegal immigrants are eating pet cats and dogs” moment in the debate. Trump succeeds when he gets people to vote who don’t normally vote. Such a bizarre video clip could go viral in the wildest reaches of boys’ only digital swamplands – and lead to a few thousand more Trump votes.
Trump has one big advantage. The polls understated his vote by 2 per cent in the last two elections. If that holds, Harris would have to be much further ahead in the polls than she is now to win.
But Harris has one big advantage. She has much more money than Trump. Democrats, like the teals in Australia at the last election, have so much corporate backing they can hire more people to implement the all-important ground game.
*************************************************
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)
***********************************************
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Everyone knows Trump, but after the debate Harris remains a mystery
When John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon faced off for a television debate in 1960, both candidates were new and fresh. Nixon blew a six-point lead with a poor performance and it took 16 years until candidates could agree to debate again.
For most incumbent presidents debates are a disaster. In 2024, with most people around the world feeling grumpy, it pays to be the challenger. Incumbency for every government, from Modi in India to Macron in France, is political arsenic.
Most Americans believe that their country is heading in the wrong direction. Kamala Harris will not win if Americans see her presidency as Joe Biden’s second term.
The Trump/Harris debate was an arm wrestle between two candidates with experience in the White House, but only Donald Trump came across as the outsider. His performance was predictable. It was a more disciplined version of his stock standard rally speech.
Harris outperformed expectations and addressed concerns she may not be up to the job. However, she spent most of the debate either defending Biden policies or attacking Trump. At this stage it won’t be enough.
Until now, polls have both candidates neck and neck. Democrats got a massive bounce out of Biden’s resignation, as the despair about Biden turned into hope with Harris. But the widely anticipated surge after the successful Democratic National Convention in Chicago never eventuated. Harris still remained a policy mystery. For four days everyone spoke about Harris, but she had less than an hour explaining herself and her policies to the electorate.
Harris has avoided tough media and adopted the small target approach of Biden in 2020. That won’t be enough. Biden was well known to most Americans who were uninterested in the daily Washington DC wash. Harris remains comparatively unknown.
It’s the reality that the Democrats need to win the popular vote by more than 2 per cent over the Republicans in order to win the electoral college that chooses the president. Harris hasn’t got that lead yet. She seems to flatline without a big enough margin.
While Trump lost the debate, nothing said or done during the nearly two hours of talk will shift votes between Harris and Trump. If you were voting for either candidate then your vote is unlikely to change.
Trump didn’t screw up and he was his authentic self. If he came out looking like he was souped up on tranquillisers then his voters would have thought he was a fraud. If he was condescending and snarly he would’ve burned off some crucial female voters.
From a presentation perspective, Trump needed to avoid being rude. He was reasonably coherent and effective. Harris needed to be calm and strong. Her personal attacks on Trump were targeted and well researched.
It remains the case that the most important voting demographic for Trump is white women. In 2016 and 2020, he received more of their votes than either Hillary Clinton or Biden. In the election he lost to Biden, too many white women gave up on him and his behaviour.
They are the demographic most attuned to cost-of-living pressures and national security. Trump’s strong words on the exit from Afghanistan and his closure of the Mexican border resonate with these voters. At the same time, they don’t like a bully and Trump was saved from himself by the mute button which the Harris campaign didn’t want.
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has reacted to the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Similarly, an overly aggressive Harris would have turned off her soft vote supporters. It’s much harder for a woman to be aggressive, but Harris performed well in that environment.
This election, more than ever, is about voter turnout. Trump was correct to say he has won more votes than any other candidate for president, apart from Biden in 2020. I suspect Trump will lose few of those votes.
If they voted for him against Biden four years ago, nothing, until now, would cause them to change their vote to Harris. Trump 2.0 is the same as Trump 1.0, but today he is more desperate to win.
Was there anything said or done by the candidates in this presidential debate that will cause an undecided voter to get off the couch and go and stand for three hours waiting to vote in a queue, in the chilly conditions of a Wisconsin, Pennsylvania or Michigan autumn? No.
It’s more likely that this election will be decided on policies rather than personalities – and the personality vote is now locked in. For the voters who really matter, the issues discussed in the debate were often peripheral. According to the Pew Research Centre, the No.1 issue for American voters is the economy.
It was the first issue discussed and the debate was orderly and useful. Both candidates prosecuted their cases successfully. After that came abortion. It’s not in the top seven issues for voters.
The abortion vote is already locked in. If it is the deciding issue for a voter, they are already locked in to their candidate. People who have a strong view either way have already decided how they will vote. Similarly, the January 6 vote is locked in, as is the Trump is a criminal vote, the Trump rudeness vote and the Trump is a liar vote.
It took forever to get to health, education, foreign policy, violent crime and immigration.
With all of that, why is the race still too close to call? For too many voters, Harris is still a mystery. Voters want change and Harris has just 55 days to explain why she is different to Biden. We know she is very different to Trump but that’s not enough. She needs to distance herself from Biden and on only two issues she was effective with that – small business and housing.
Trump showed he is different to the Biden/Harris administration on immigration, taxes, tariffs, foreign relations with China, NATO and foreign adversaries, student loans and Ukraine.
On guns and fracking, Harris wants to be close to Trump. On health, Trump wants to be close to Harris. Welfare didn’t get a mention, which would have benefited Harris. Addressing the surge of fentanyl didn’t get much attention either and that would have helped Trump.
Everyone knows Trump and what he stands for. Harris is still too much of a mystery. This election is still too close to call.
***************************************************
Rurals, Young People, and Hispanics Revert Back Toward Trump after Harris Surge in July
After an initial surge of support for Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden exited the race in July, the polls have narrowed significantly.
Immediately upon announcing her candidacy seven weeks ago, Harris received a bump in support – particularly among key factions of the Democratic base that Biden had been steadily losing ground with for well over a year. Young people, independents, and minorities all appeared more interested in Harris than they were in Biden seven weeks ago, but that picture has shifted, with Harris suffering relatively large declines since early July.
The most striking decline for Harris has been among young people. Young voters had been steadily distancing themselves from Biden for well over a year by the time the president announced his retirement, and for a brief snapshot in time, Harris appeared to be activating at least a portion of young voters, namely young women.
That picture has shifted over the past seven weeks. A New York Times/Siena College poll from July shows Harris earning 59 percent of voters under 30 to former President Donald Trump’s 38 percent among the likely electorate, placing her nearly at the same level (60 percent) as Biden won four years ago.
However, youth enthusiasm has largely fizzled for Harris since the thrill of her “Brat” campaign has worn off. Economic reality has set in, and the latest Times poll from September places Harris at just 51 percent among voters under age 30. This represents an eight-point decline since she announced her candidacy and has nearly erased the gains she briefly held over Biden’s campaign.
Trump, meanwhile, has scrambled back up to 43 percent of the youth vote over the past seven weeks, a five-point gain since Harris became the nominee. Harris’ eight-point decline looks even worse when compared to the total share of the youth vote Biden won in 2020. According to CNN exit polls, Biden won young voters 60 percent to Trump’s 36 percent, meaning Harris is trailing Biden’s 2020 numbers by nine points, while Trump has gained seven points compared to 2020.
Harris’ brief “blip” in youth support right after Biden exited the race does not appear to be sustainable. Trump, however, has been polling around ten points above what he gained in 2020 with young people for over a year now. Democrats are on track to face the November election with a much-reduced pool of youth support compared to 2020, while Republicans have made incremental gains, despite an onslaught of attempts to portray Trump as a dictator. Among all other age groups, Harris’ numbers have stayed relatively stable since she entered the race with only marginal one or two points shifts.
While it isn’t as large of a decline as the numbers among young people, Hispanics have also reduced their support for Harris since she entered the race seven weeks ago, ousting Biden. According to the same Times poll looking at the likely electorate, 60 percent of Hispanics planned to support Harris shortly after she became the nominee, while 36 percent planned to support Trump.
The latest Times poll shows a five-point decline for Harris, with just 55 percent of Hispanics now intending to support her, while 41 percent plan to support Trump. This amounts to a five-point decline for Harris and a five-point gain for Trump over the past seven weeks.
Again, for reference compare Harris’ current standing in the polls to the share of the electorate Biden won in 2020, and the picture is even worse for Democrats. Biden won 65 percent of the Latino vote in 2020, while Trump earned 32 percent. As polls stand seven weeks after Harris announced her candidacy, she is on track to fall short of Biden’s 2020 numbers by ten points, while Trump is expected to gain nine points.
Where else is Harris in trouble? Harris may be suffering a decline in support among rural voters, after earning a small blip in July. Rural voters have increasingly skewed Republican, but just after Biden was ousted Harris was earning around 36 percent of the vote from rural areas to Trump’s 59 percent.
However, seven weeks later she is earning around 31 percent of the rural vote, while Trump has skyrocketed up to 65 percent of the vote. Compared to 2020, this is an eight-point gain for Trump in rural areas, with Trump winning 57 percent of the rural vote four years ago.
For Harris, this represents an eleven-point decline compared to the share of the rural vote (42 percent) Joe Biden earned four years ago. This isn’t that surprising. Biden attempted to portray himself as a simple blue-collar Democrat from Scranton, Pennsylvania, while Harris is a coastal elitist from deep-blue California who is not even attempting to resonate with middle America.
That said, just because Trump has regained footing among groups that were already on the way out the door for Democrats doesn’t mean Harris isn’t seeing an increase in support among certain demographics. City folks and Black voters have flocked to her side in larger numbers over the past seven weeks.
As of July, Harris was having difficulty attracting support from Black voters, but she appears to be gaining. She is up six points with Black voters, going from 72 percent of their vote in July to 78 percent as of early September. While this is a relatively large gain for Harris, she is still polling nine points below the 87 percent of the Black vote Biden won in 2020.
Trump, for his part, is polling at 14 percent of the Black vote in the latest Times poll, which would constitute a modest two-to-three-point gain compared to 2020. It isn’t much, but against a candidate that is being sold to the public as the “first Black female president”, it is worth noting she is doing slightly worse than Biden.
Then, there are city dwellers, another group that appears to be consolidating their support behind Harris. July’s poll had Harris earning a comfortable 59 percent of the city-folk vote, but that number has climbed to 63 percent. This represents a slight gain over the 60 percent of the city vote Biden earned in 2020, indicating Harris could beat Biden’s numbers among city dwellers.
In short, the longstanding demographic losses for Democrats among young voters and Hispanics which Americans for Limited Government and others have been covering for well over a year now appear to be “real” at least according to polls.
Young voters and Hispanics have been shifting away from Democrats over the past four years due to the Biden Administration’s mishandling of key issues like inflation and immigration, and they do not appear to be circling back just because Kamala Harris is heading the ticket now.
The urban/rural divide is likely to be even larger this election than it was in 2020, with Trump further consolidating support among rural Americans and Harris gaining over Biden’s numbers among urbanites. Black voters like Harris more than they liked Biden seven weeks ago as he teetered out of the race, but they still like her less than they liked the Biden of 2020.
*************************************************
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)
***********************************************
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
3 on 1: Trump Clashes With Harris—and the Debate ‘Moderators’
ABC’s debate moderators’ performance in Tuesday night’s presidential debate made CNN’s performance in June look like a master class in fairness, objectivity, and balance.
It was exactly the kind of debate moderation left-wing commentators on X have been demanding for months—years, really.
They don’t want anything approaching objectivity. They wanted moderators to “fact-check” former President Donald Trump every step of the way while allowing his opponent to pontificate on questions they think will be beneficial to Democratic Party fortunes.
And that’s essentially what happened.
ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis continually “fact-checked” Trump in real time, arguing with him after nearly every answer. That makes for a horrible debate format.
Were the Lincoln-Douglas debates fact-checked by interjecting moderators? Of course not. The debate was between the two men and their ideas.
But in Tuesday night’s debate, the moderators didn’t even bother to create the mirage of objectivity. They hounded Trump every step of the way while stepping aside to allow Harris to make her points. They weren’t fact-checking on behalf of the American people, they were interjecting on behalf of their partisan interest.
The fact-checks weren’t even particularly accurate, not that that really seemed to matter to the moderators. For instance, when Trump said that Democrats in some states support after-birth abortion, Davis interjected that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after birth.”
As The Daily Signal has reported, there are many states—including Minnesota, the home state of Harris’ running mate Gov. Tim Walz—that allow babies who survive abortions to die.
Harris didn’t get this treatment at all. Moderators politely allowed Harris to say whatever she wanted.
Even in the most obvious case of Harris going with the tired fabrication about Trump calling white supremacists “very fine people” in Charlottesville, Va.—fact-checked as false by even the reliably left-wing Snopes—Muir and Davis said nothing.
The fix was in.
To a certain extent, left-wing journalists demanding this kind of rigging is understandable. They know that the ABCs and the CNNs of the world are in the tank for their candidates. Why not use their power of control over these debates to direct it in a way that benefits Democrats, who are so clearly on the right side of history?
That mentality won out on Tuesday night and lefty commentators were giddy on social media.
“I will say it ABC moderators have exceeded expectations. They are fact-checking and confronting, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin posted on X. “Shows how abysmal CNN was.”
That mirrors how the Left generally thinks all our society’s institutions should work. Alternatives to the narratives the Left peddles should be carefully managed and massaged so the people are led to only one point of view.
That’s why the Left had a full-blown meltdown when entrepreneur Elon Musk bought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. It meant that they would no longer have the power to put the finger on the lever of amplifying the messages they like while suppressing the ones they don’t.
But this sort of bias comes at a cost. Institutions that ply on their objectivity as their main selling point risk surrendering the power of that credibility when they blatantly put their finger on the scale for a particular ideology.
The public’s attitude toward ABC and their cohorts and the media has followed the same course as public health institutions in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns. When after months of telling everyone to lock down for everyone else’s safety, they largely came out in favor of Black Lives Matter protests because “racism is the real pandemic,” they lost an enormous number of American who will never trust them again.
ABC’s moderators’ performance Tuesday night is a perfect example of why we have “populism.”
Did Trump fall into the traps ABC and the Harris campaign set in this 3-on-1 debate? Yes, probably. They will now pat themselves on the back and think of it as a job well done until Election Day.
With some Americans, that’s all good and well. Trump is too dangerous to be given a fair shake. With a fair debate, the people may choose poorly.
But the stacked deck highlighted the theme that Trump has always used to great success with his supporters since he became the Republican presidential nominee the first time way back in 2015. The system is rigged against you. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters.
That message was driven home on Tuesday night. Maybe this was mission accomplished for ABC, but Muir and Davis did a disservice to the American people and certainly discredited themselves.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/11/trump-takes-harris-moderators/
*****************************************************Harris fails to make her case on inflation, real wages and fundamental freedoms
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement commenting on tonight’s presidential debate:
“America finally got to hear Kamala Harris as she once again failed to address the critical issues facing our nation, providing no answers to the continued high costs of food and housing and the decline in America’s real wages. The Harris-Biden inflation has destroyed many Americans’ hope to achieve the American dream. Continuing the Harris economic policy for another four years will result in higher taxes and bigger deficits that already have us on the brink of recession. Continuing with open borders endangers public safety, our schools and communities. And an expansion of the weaponized administrative state threatens our fundamental constitutional freedoms. Americans who care about their children’s future will vote to return Donald Trump to the Oval Office, after all, weak and stupid is no way to run a country.”
*******************************************************
‘Kamala Harris Is Running a Giveaway Campaign’: Economist
Ben Johnson
As presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris approach their first debate on Tuesday, their campaigns have unveiled economic policies that seem in some ways diametrically opposed — and only one could stimulate “robust economic growth,” a leading economist has warned.
Harris has proposed imposing price controls on food, undoing the Trump tax cuts of 2017 by raising the top tax rate to 39.6%, hiking corporate taxes and capital gains taxes to 28%, giving first-time homebuyers $25,000, and doubling down on Obamacare by raising taxpayer-funded subsidies for those who buy their plans from the exchange.
She also proposed one tax cut to benefit small businesses. “I want to see 25 million new small business applications by the end of my first term,” said Harris last week. “So, part of my plan is we will expand the tax deduction for startups to $50,000.”
In a speech at the Economic Club of New York last Thursday, former President Trump proposed unleashing the power of the free market by maintaining the 2017 tax cuts and further slashing the corporate tax from 21% to 15%, cutting red tape, protecting U.S. manufacturing by raising tariffs on imported goods, clawing back all unspent funds from the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, and making more jobs available to U.S. citizens by deporting illegal immigrants who lower wages and compete for jobs.
Both candidates agree on ending federal taxation on tips, a policy first proposed this presidential race by Trump and parroted by Harris.
“Kamala Harris is running a giveaway campaign,” Paul Mueller, a senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm last Thursday. “Of course, the Biden administration has been trying to cancel various forms of student debt for years now. And her approach, I think, to stimulating the economy is more of what we’ve seen over the past four years, which is extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending. It’s not really an organic growth within the economy.”
Artificial stimulus raises prices, a major problem over the course of the Biden-Harris administration. “When you subsidize people’s ability to buy things — whether that’s higher education or health care — and we give people money in the form of loans or grants or scholarships to do that, what it does is boosts demand. And so what we see over time in both of those areas is rising costs. The cost of higher education has grown much faster than everything else in the economy. The rate of increase for health care has increased very rapidly,” Mueller stated. “And so this $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers, while it sounds nice, it’s actually going to continue to put upward pressure on the price of housing overall.”
The entire amount of the subsidy is “actually going to be eaten up by rising prices,” Mueller noted.
Even a putatively pro-business tax policy like a small business tax credit could backfire. “There are a lot of small business owners who maybe will close down their existing business and start a new one just to get the tax credit,” Mueller warned.
On the other hand, “President Trump’s agenda” has the potential to spur “robust economic growth” in an organic way, said Mueller. “He has talked about wanting to roll back regulations.”
Mueller noted he opposed Trump’s tariff policy, “and, then, he hasn’t really addressed runaway government spending. And the more money that is spent by the federal government, the less money there is for people in the private sector to spend on their businesses, their houses, their projects.”
Backholm suggested the greatest vacuum in economic dialogue involves America’s $35 trillion national debt. “So far, we are not seeing a lot of politicians raise their hand and say, ‘I’m the guy that’s going to give you less so we can save the future.’ I think that might be what we need. We’re not getting that from anybody at this point.”
https://washingtonstand.com/news/kamala-harris-is-running-a-giveaway-campaign-economist
*************************************************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)
***********************************************
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Kamala Harris Campaign Platform Makes Promises Based on False Assumptions
Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ nominee for president, finally released her policy platform Monday, a little over 24 hours before her first debate with former President Donald Trump.
The Harris platform makes various claims about the root causes of issues faced by America and the way Harris plans to address those issues. The claims underlying her policy promises are false, however.
Here is a look at what the Harris campaign released under the title “A New Way Forward.”
Harris Vows to ‘Secure Border’ After 4 Years of Open Borders
Harris’ policy platform says that, if elected, she will “secure our border and fix our broken immigration system.” The Biden-Harris administration, however, abruptly shifted the nation’s border policies on Day One, enabling a massive influx of illegal immigrants since 2021.
The platform focuses on “the bipartisan border bill” that failed to pass the House of Representatives in 2023 and suggests the legislation would solve illegal immigration.
The platform blames Trump for “killing the bipartisan border bill” although out of office and thereby failing to solve the border crisis. The platform states that Harris would sign the legislation, suggesting that nothing more is needed to solve the underlying issues.
Congressional Republicans, however, said the border bill was political posturing and not a true effort to secure the border.
The bill “spends $20 billion to not secure the border, but to more efficiently encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told reporters.
Harris arguably shares responsibility for the border crisis with President Joe Biden, who tasked her in March 2021 with solving the “root causes” of illegal immigration from three Central American nations. That’s when both supporters and critics began referring to Harris as Biden’s “border czar.”
Harris Says Equality Act Will ‘Protect Civil Rights and Freedoms’
Harris now promises to “protect civil rights and freedoms” by passing the Equality Act to “enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.”
But critics say the Equality Act would undermine women’s civil rights in order to help a minority of men who claim to be women.
The bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It would force schools and other programs to allow biological males who “identify” as females to compete against girls and women in sports and use private female facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms.
Harris Blames Inflation on Price Gouging, Not Government Spending
Harris’ policy statement on inflation suggests again that price gouging, not government spending, is the central driver of rising prices.
“As president, she will direct her administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers,” the campaign website states.
However, as Heritage Foundation budget expert EJ Antoni pointed out, there is a far more obvious culprit: government spending.
Antoni, an economist, noted: “One of the functions of money is that of a measuring tool. If a yardstick were to shrink from 36 inches down to just 30, it would take 120 of these shortened yardsticks to cover the distance of a football field, instead of 100. As the dollar has lost value, it takes more dollars to measure the value of the things we buy.”
If price gouging caused 40-year record-high inflation, Antoni asked, did businessmen “magically” become greedy when Biden and Harris took office?
“Were corporations never greedy in the 40 years leading up to Biden’s inflationary expansion of government?” he asked. “Businesses haven’t even passed all their higher costs on to consumers; if they’re trying to be greedy, they’re doing it all wrong.”
Harris’ policy platform also tacitly admits that it is implausible that price gouging is responsible for increases in prices. The platform notes that her “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries” would “build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states.”
If bans on price gouging were the solution to inflation, wouldn’t these bans have prevented the problem in those 37 states?
Harris Promises Crackdown on Iran, Though Biden-Harris Admin’s Loose Sanctions Netted Regime Billions
Harris’ platform talks a tough game on Iran, the world’s top sponsor of radical Islamist terrorism.
A section on keeping America safe proclaims: “Vice President Harris will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to protect U.S. forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.”
Tehran is the top financial sponsor of the terrorist group Hamas, which infamously slaughtered 1,139 Israelis—including women and children—on Oct. 7 in southern Israel.
Harris’ new policy pronouncements overlook the fact that the Biden-Harris administration loosened U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, netting the Islamist regime $71 billion more before Oct. 7 than under Trump-Pence administration policies.
If Harris would “never hesitate” to protect U.S. interests from Iran, did she object to the administration’s move to loosen sanctions?
Harris Repeats Widely Debunked Claim That Trump Campaign Created Project 2025
The Harris policy platform includes several tabs contrasting the vice president’s positions with what it calls “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda,” although Trump repeatedly has distanced himself from The Heritage Foundation-led Presidential Transition Project.
In fact, a campaign official for Harris already has acknowledged that the vice president has deliberately misled voters about Project 2025.
Harris and her campaign repeatedly have tried to link Project 2025 to Trump, despite the former president’s pushback.
In a particularly ironic claim, Harris said Trump would implement his Project 2025 agenda to consolidate power, bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power, go after opponents, and “rule as a dictator on ‘Day One.’”
However, the Biden-Harris Justice Department targeted pro-lifers and other Americans with dissenting political and religious views, particularly after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and abortion on demand in June 2022.
For instance, a Michigan jury recently found seven pro-life activists guilty of engaging in a conspiracy against rights and violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, for peacefully protesting outside an abortion clinic.
The charges against the pro-life activists were brought by DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.
Launched two years ago by The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has grown to a coalition of 110 conservative organizations that developed a transition plan for the next presidential administration. The Heritage-led coalition considers its work to be nonpartisan and offers it to whoever occupies the White House in January 2025.
******************************************************
Peaked too soon? Poll puts Harris behind Trump ahead of debate
The surge in support for Kamala Harris has faded, a new poll suggests, leaving Donald Trump ahead in the run-up to what may be the only televised debate between the candidates, scheduled for Wednesday (AEST).
For the first time in a month Trump is narrowly ahead, with 48 to 47 per cent support nationwide among those likely to vote, according to the New York Times/Siena College poll. It also showed that nearly a third of Americans felt that they needed to learn more about Harris and where she stands on the issues that matter to voters. Only 9 per cent felt that way about Trump.
A survey by CBS News of voters in three swing states showed Harris ahead by a single point in Michigan and Wisconsin, and tied with Trump in the crucial battleground of Pennsylvania. A YouGov poll last week, commissioned by The Times, put Harris ahead in four swing states and Trump in three.
Wednesday’s television debate, in Philadelphia, will be held without a studio audience, but with a vast one watching at home.
Trump has repeatedly warned – without evidence – that there may be widespread fraud in the coming election, and suggested that he may not accept the result if he loses. He went further at the weekend by declaring on his social media platform Truth Social, and on X, that he would, as president, target “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” involved “in unscrupulous behaviour”.
They would be “prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country” and they would face “long term prison sentences”, he added.
Harris has been preparing for the debate in a hotel in Pittsburgh with Philippe Reines, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, playing the role of Trump in rehearsals. He is known for taking a meticulous approach, dressing up in a voluminous dark suit and a bright tie, and even wearing lifts in his shoes to boost his height.
Trump has more experience than any recent candidate in presidential debates, having taken part in six, and his team have maintained that he does not require “prep” but rather takes part in a series of policy discussions. However, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who during the primary debates of 2019 landed blows on Harris’s record as a prosecutor, has said she is helping Trump to prepare. Several leading Republicans have urged him to focus on policy differences, rather than personal attacks.
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who was Trump’s most significant opponent in the primaries, said yesterday that she was “on standby” to help in his campaign if asked.
The Siena College poll suggested that this may be an advantage for Trump. Only a third of voters appeared to feel that he was “too far to the right”, while 48 per cent believed that Harris was “too liberal”.
The Trump campaign hailed the poll as more accurate than other recent ones. “The simple truth is that when a survey reflects the actual electorate, President Trump is in the lead,” it said.
*************************************************
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)
***********************************************
Monday, September 09, 2024
America’s sick kids are the new political battleground
An hilarious new US campaign ad, styled as a drug ad complete with symptoms, side-effects, testimonials and a gravely concerned voice-over, treats TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome – as a genuine disease. The remedy is ‘Independence’, but the narrator intones ‘Independence may not be right for you. Ask your doctor’. The ad went viral, hitting five million views in its first week, and exciting much comment.
It was the witty work of the effective Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr’s running mate and lawyer, a reformed Democrat and committed health advocate coming to prominence after the recent union of the Trump campaign with RFK Jnr’s push. Her latest follow-up ad plays powerfully on the JFK and RFK assassinations, and urges ‘Finish the Story, Bobby’. It brought a tear to this old Boomer’s eye and rocketed to over 3 million views on its first day.
Unexpected synergies are emerging from the freshly combined energies of MAGA, and the newly created MAHA, Make America Healthy Again. Shanahan herself says that Democrats throttled and sabotaged the RFK Jnr campaign, and she’s enjoying the bigger platform and audience that the Trump campaign is giving their issues, appearing widely in all forms of media. If X is anything to go by, the MAGA crowd is loving Shanahan and her health views right back.
More to the point, a potent sleeper issue is now emerging in the race to the White House, and that issue is health, specifically children’s health. Few issues have the power to move mothers’ votes like their sick kids.
The voting gender gap is an area of notorious weakness for Trump, whose womanising and old-style masculine braggadocio turns off the misses of the #MeToo era. A CBS News poll in mid-August found that 54 per cent of men broke for Trump but only 44 per cent of women. Young women are a demographic that Trump needs, and he is promoting MAHA and RFK Jnr vigorously; Kennedy is spoken of as Trump’s likely health czar.
One small recent poll shows Kennedy voters breaking two-for-one for Trump, but many of Kennedy’s old hippies and alternative lifestylers will never contemplate voting Trump. However, RFK Jnr’s endorsement of Trump will provide cover for some, especially women, to change their vote, as the only way to improve a society ruined with processed, sugary foods and jabbed to near-infinity by a Centers for Disease Control which recommends more than 70 vaccinations by the time children reach 18.
Shanahan herself, billionaire ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, tags her X account Healthy Planet and Healthy Humans. She has skin in the game, with an autistic child. The whole thrust of RFK Jnr’s campaign, and his life’s work, is to clean up America’s corrupted and toxic food, farming and institutional systems; few have been more personally affected by US evils than he has, and his corporate knowledge is second to none.
While RFK Jnr’s family has virtually disowned him, he has the runs on the board as an environmental litigator of note and success, and chairs the Children’s Health Defense, which has long attacked issues such as fluoridation in water, dangerous chemicals, excessive vaccinations and the US’s highly processed and adulterated food supply, heavy with sugars, seed oils and chemicals of unknown combined effect.
It is too early to tell if this will move the election needle, with no clear signal yet in the polling of any RFK Jnr boost for Trump. However, there are promising signs of traction on social media for the MAHA message. This crystallised for me when I heard young conservative podcaster Alex Clark, whose audience is aged 25 to 35, report that leftist influencer mums are contacting her to say they will hold their noses and vote for Trump for the sake of their children’s health.
Politically, health campaigning has all too often been expensive promises about benefits, more drugs and surgery, more hospitals and research, and cheaper medicines, but rarely has the underlying system itself been examined. It’s a sickness system, rather than a health creation system, and long overdue for a clean-up.
There’s clearly a crisis when the nation that spends by far the most on health care per capita globally achieves devastatingly bad, and worsening outcomes, well below that of similar developed countries. US life expectancy is far below that of comparable countries, falling to around 48th globally in recent figures, below Albania and Greece. Autism rates are now 1 in 36 children in the US, yet for US Boomer generations, RFK Jnr says it was 1 in 10,000. Around 40 per cent of US children have a chronic disease, and 60 per cent of adults. Some 40 per cent of Americans are obese, compared with 3 per cent of Japanese. Another 30 per cent are overweight.
America is sick, and one needs only arrive in a US airport to suddenly notice bulging uniforms and vanishing jawlines, amid a reported $1 billion-a-month avalanche of prescription drug ads, the US being one of only two countries in the world permitting them. Big Pharma is the biggest lobbyist in Washington, and the revolving door between US regulatory agencies and big corporations is notorious. In a startling recent example of regulatory capture, as reported on Daily Wire from FoIA-ed emails, EPA clean air boss Joe Goffman asked a chemical lobbyist what he needed to do on a particular issue. ‘Dance You Monkey, Dance’ came the contemptuous reply.
The danger of ultra-processed foods is at last being understood, with California lawmakers recently becoming the first to ban schools from serving foods with six artificial ingredients linked to low IQ, behavioural problems and cancer; RFK Jnr recently told Fox that almost 1,000 chemicals banned in EU foods are still widely used in US foods. Leftist media icon Bill Maher frequently attacks the pill-happy US medical system, and said ‘enabler’ doctors killed performers Matthew Perry, Tom Petty, Michael Jackson, Prince and Elvis.
If the Trump campaign can publicise the shocking truths of America’s illness epidemics via the addition of RFK Jnr’s truth bullets, then not only the US but countries downstream, such as Australia, will benefit, and our children most of all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-kennedy-factor/
*****************************************Demise of the old Dems: Hollywood elites have taken over the workers’ party
Political parties can change over time and morph into a new entity whilst retaining their outward appearance. The transition can be difficult to detect, especially for those intimately involved in the day-to-day machinations of the parties. Often an event highlights a change that has been underway for some time. Such was the defection of Robert F. Kennedy Jnr from the Democratic party and his subsequent endorsement of Donald Trump. It was an event that marked the end of the old Dems. It is not so much that RFK Jnr has changed: the Democratic party itself has been steered a long way from the moorings of his father and uncle. It seems often that the only thing the Democratic party of the 1960s shares with the party today is the name.
Mr Kennedy’s withering critique of the modern party is a measure of the change. Recalling that he attended his first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960, he summarised the changes. ‘Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, against imperialism, and against unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy. As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money.’
Whether readers agree with Kennedy about the various issues he mentioned or not, his analysis is pertinent. ‘What alarms me [most] is the resort to censorship, media control, and weaponisation of the federal agencies. When a US president colludes with, or outright coerces media companies to censor political speech, it’s an attack on our most sacred right of free expression. And that’s the very right upon which all of our other constitutional rights rest.’
The new Democratic party is the home of the Silicon Valley capitalists, the progressive not-for-profits, the Hollywood elite, and a wealthy east coast oligarchy typified by the Obamas.
It was the Hollywood elite led by George Clooney who told Biden to go; it was Billy Baldwin who chastised RFK for supporting Trump. It was Quentin Tarantino who instructed Harris not to do any interviews. Look up the biography of most Hollywood celebrities: almost all of them are Democrat supporters and financial contributors. In 2023, Vice President Harris spent more time in California than almost all the other states of America combined.
It was the Obamas who abandoned Biden when it became clear that he was no longer useful and would lose to Trump. It was this same coalition that fought off the real socialists in the party such as Bernie Sanders and the Gang of Four.
Rereading John F. Kennedy’s acceptance speech to the Democratic convention in July 1960, it is difficult to imagine how he could be a member of the Democratic party today. ‘The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride. It appeals to our pride, not our security – it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security…. That is the choice that our nation must make – a choice that lies not merely between two men or two parties, but between the public interest and private comfort – between national greatness and national decline – between the fresh air of progress and the stale, dank atmosphere of ‘normalcy’ – between dedication or mediocrity.’
Much of what JFK said in that speech and many others could be uttered by mainstream Republicans in more recent times.
The change in the party is profound. To take one example: there are no more pro-life Democratic members of Congress. A few years ago, a colleague from the US told me that he was the last pro-life Democrat member of Congress. He has since lost his primary to the new forces. The impact of this change was on full display at the Democrat National Convention, complete with its attendant brash abortion clinics. Ms Harris, as Californian Attorney General was at the forefront of efforts to harass pro-life centres until the pursuit was curbed by the US Supreme Court. And another example: a Teamsters boss spoke at the Republican National Convention, not at the convention of the party historically supportive of the working class. Many wealthy professionals are happy to employ migrants, especially the low paid. Standing up for the workers, as past generations of Democratic leaders did, has largely dissipated.
Win or lose, 2024 marks the end of the traditional Democratic party. Joe Biden will come to be seen as the last of the old Democrats, politically executed when no longer of service to the new rulers. Kamala Harris was not their preferred choice, but now ensconced as the presidential candidate, the force of the ruling coalition is being thrown behind her campaign. Witness the amount of money raised in just a couple of weeks. Mr Trump ignores this phenomenon at his peril. Most of the new Democrats are no more socialist than the wealthy capitalists who fund the Teals in Australia.
Instead of attacking Ms Harris, Mr Trump would be advised to stick to his core messages about the economy, the cost of living and illegal immigration. The working class have much to lose from uncontrolled immigration and the most vocal critics are usually migrants themselves.
This historic shift is not confined to the Democratic party. The Republican party of Ronald Reagan and the Bush family is now the Trump movement. The gulf between Ronald Reagan’s acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in Detroit in July 1980 and Mr Trump’s remarks in Milwaukee is as wide as the Midwest.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/demise-of-the-old-dems/
***********************************************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)
***********************************************
Sunday, September 08, 2024
The New York Times’ Weird Attack on JD Vance
Once again, corporate media is painting a conservative lawmaker’s mainstream views as out-of-touch and bizarre.
In 2017, JD Vance, then known for authoring his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” wrote an introduction to The Heritage Foundation’s 2017 Index for Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays and charts looking at the state of families and prosperity in the United States.
Cue the freakout from The New York Times and others.
“Years before he became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance endorsed a little-noticed 2017 report by The Heritage Foundation that proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families,” wrote New York Times reporter Lisa Lerer in an article published Tuesday.
Others quickly piled on.
“The vice-presidential candidate previously endorsed a collection of almost 30 essays by ultraconservative thinkers on restricting reproductive rights and other freedoms,” wrote The Daily Beast. Business Insider fretted that “JD Vance endorsed a report that criticizes people watching pornography.” MSNBC said Vance’s introduction “has come back to haunt him,” saying the index “includes essays that espouse right-wing talking points, targeting single-parent households, divorce rates, welfare programs, and housing assistance.”
The Times, for its part, decided to use a sentence I wrote for the 2017 index to show just how insane they think Vance is.
“Authors argued in the 2017 report that women should become pregnant at younger ages and that a two-parent, heterosexual household was the ‘ideal’ environment for children,” wrote Lerer.
She added, “‘The ideal situation for any child is growing up with the mother and father who brought that child into the world,’ wrote Katrina Trinko, a conservative journalist, in an essay detailing the ‘tragedy’ of babies born to single mothers.”
Now to be clear, as both Vance’s spokesperson and The Heritage Foundation have said, Vance had no editorial control or approval over my essay or any of the others in the 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity.
And for the record, while The New York Times couldn’t be bothered to include it, I also wrote in that essay, “Every parent who chooses life in adverse circumstances should be commended. Many single moms and dads, whether due to later circumstances or a surprise pregnancy, have nobly risen to the task and done an amazing job of raising their children …”
But let’s look at my supposedly radical claim that the ideal should be kids growing up with both parents.
First, my view is actually the mainstream view.
Nearly half of Americans (47%) think that single women raising kids on their own is bad for society, while only 10% think it’s a good thing for society, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center poll.
That’s not surprising—because the data clearly shows that kids do best when raised by a married mom and dad.
In fact, if Lerer had just read her own outlet, she would know that. In a 2023 commentary headlined “The Explosive Rise of Single-Parent Families Is Not a Good Thing,” economics professor Melissa Kearney writes, “The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood.”
In Kearney’s book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” she explored whether the disadvantages children of single parents faced could be explained by income or education differences between single parents and married parents.
But the data shows that it’s the family formation, not simply parents’ education and income, that affect the children. “A child born in a two-parent household with a family income of $50,000 has, on average, better outcomes than a child born in a single-parent household earning the same income,” writes Kearney.
Meanwhile, among kids who have a married mom with a bachelor’s degree, 57% have a bachelor’s degree of their own by age 25, according to Kearney. But among kids who have a single mom with a bachelor’s degree, only 28% have a bachelor’s degree by age 25.
Funnily enough, while the elites may attack Vance for daring to espouse traditional values, their own behavior suggests they actually agree with him.
“Many elites today—professors, journalists, educators, and other culture shapers—publicly discount or deny the importance of marriage, the two-parent family, and the value of doing all that you can to ‘stay together for the sake of the children,’ even as they privately value every one of these things. On family matters, they ‘talk left’ but ‘walk right,’” observes Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, in a February Atlantic essay.
Wilcox, author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization,” noted that a 2022 survey found that a mere 30% of college-educated liberals agreed that children are better off if they have two married parents. (In contrast, 91% of college-educated conservatives agreed with this.) But these college-educated liberals are not themselves going on to become single parents: “69% of the parents within this same group [college-educated liberals] were themselves stably married,” writes Wilcox.
So apparently, Vance’s real crime isn’t daring to live by traditional values. It’s that he actually shares those views out loud.
Vance, as many know from his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” did not grow up in a stable, two-parent family. His parents divorced when he was young, with his dad essentially disappearing. His mother married five times and struggled with drug addiction. Vance was ultimately raised by his grandparents.
There was eventually a happy ending for his mom—Vance proudly shared at the Republican National Convention that she was 10 years sober from drugs—but it came long after Vance’s childhood.
Vance’s essay in the 2017 index highlights how, years before he became an Ohio senator, he was frustrated by the refusal of the elites to look at how culture shaped outcomes of Americans.
“[P]urely economic questions miss something important about our current moment. Too rigid a focus on the material permits us to divorce concerns about opportunity from those about culture. In some ways, this is understandable: The comfort zone of many elites, and thus, their language trends toward the mathematical and technocratic,” he wrote before concluding, “But talk about it we must, because the evidence that culture matters should now overwhelm any suggestion to the contrary.”
Vance later added:
Recognizing the importance of culture is not the same as moral condemnation. We should not glance quickly at the poor and suggest that their problems derive entirely from their own bad decisions before moving on to other matters. Rather, we should consider the very intuitive fact that the way we grow up shapes us. It molds our attitudes, our habits, and our decisions. It sets boundaries for how we perceive possibilities in our own lives.
Culture, in other words, must serve as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one, and proper conversation about culture will never be used as a weapon against those whom Christ described as “the least of these.” It will be a needed antidote to a simplistic political discourse that speaks often about the vulnerable even as it regularly fails to help them. [Emphasis mine.]
That last sentence struck me because it gets to the heart of what sets apart the Yale-educated Vance from his elite peers: A desire to actually help people, even if it means being courageous and saying something politically incorrect.
But for refusing to be hypocritical, to live one way and talk another way, Vance is getting crucified by the Left. That’s not surprising. But if we’re serious about helping Americans live better lives, we need fewer sneering New York Times pieces and more Vances.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/06/new-york-times-weird-attack-vance/
****************************************************Harris is no champion of women
Vice President Kamala Harris claims to be a champion for women, but many facts tell a different story.
Harris speaks pro-women rhetoric, but fails to protect women and girls from assaults in locker rooms.
Harris endorsed a new Biden-Harris administration rule expanding Title IX protections to gender identity and sexual orientation, requiring schools receiving federal funds to allow males into female spaces such as restrooms and locker rooms, or into any activity currently separated as male or female.
Initial Title IX rules—signed into law by a Republican president more than 50 years ago—protect women and girls against sex-based discrimination, allowing girls to flourish in school and on extracurricular sports teams.
Regrettably, this final rule redefining “female” also threatens free speech on campus, protects teachers unions, and obstructs due process protections for students accused of sexual harassment on campus.
Harris also fails to protect women and girls from sexual assault as they seek to cross illegally into America at the U.S. southern border. Sexual assault rates of migrant women coming to the United States is shocking, yet Harris embraces policies that incentivize further illegal immigration and human trafficking.
Reports vary widely on the scope of the sexual violence, which speaks to the lack of concern that Harris embodies. Amnesty International reported:
Rape is widespread. It is believed that as many as six out of every 10 migrant women and girls experience sexual violence during the journey.
A 2017 report by Doctors Without Borders found 1 in 3 women traveling through Mexico are sexually assaulted. A United Nations estimate found among women crossing without husbands or families, up to 70% suffered some type of abuse.
The rampant sexual abuse is perpetuated and grows the more policies like those from Harris and President Joe Biden encourage millions to enter the United States illegally. For example, under former President Donald Trump, the “Remain in Mexico” program and other immigration policies substantially slowed illegal immigration flow. Harris and Biden reversed Remain in Mexico, and the United States has experienced record, earth-shattering illegal immigration flows. Supposedly empowered to mitigate the so-called root causes of illegal immigration from Central American and South American countries, Harris instead stood idly by.
Even CNN is conceding that Harris is now a hypocrite for using Trump’s border wall in her new political ad to claim she supports controlling illegal immigration. CNN found more than 50 instances since 2017 of Harris slamming Trump’s border wall, with labels like “useless” and “racist.” But now Harris is running ads touting Trump’s wall.
Harris also harms America’s seniors, who are disproportionately female as women have longer life spans than men. In her role as president of the Senate, Harris cast the tiebreaking vote to raid Medicare.
Harris voted for the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, which is treating the Medicare Part D prescription-drug program for seniors as a piggy bank for the reckless spending on other, unrelated programs.
This comes on top of painful, cumulative 20% inflation on Harris’ watch, which disproportionately harms senior women, many of whom live on fixed incomes after retirement and don’t have jobs with pay keeping pace with inflation.
Harris also failed the women of Afghanistan, who are now relegated to chattel status under the Taliban due to the reckless Biden-Harris U.S. withdrawal from the country.
Harris is effectively silent on the horrific treatment of Afghan women by the Taliban, which just passed a law banning women from speaking in public, showing any skin, or looking at men they aren’t related to.
The Biden-Harris administration is directly responsible for the results of the bloody and botched Afghanistan withdrawal, yet Harris says nothing and makes zero effort to help Afghan women.
In fact, Harris has the audacity to claim, three years later, that the chaotic withdrawal decision was “courageous and right.” It was neither courageous nor right to relegate women to slave status and in the process also allow the killings of 13 U.S. service members and recklessly abandon the tens of billions of dollars in weapons and other military equipment left behind.
Pushing people to vote for a female candidate because of her gender is just as sexist as pushing voters to select a man because he’s male. Voters must see through Harris’ misogynistic policies and demand better.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/07/kamala-harris-anti-woman-misogynist-candidate/
***********************************************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)
***********************************************
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
