Monday, August 19, 2024
Sunday, August 18, 2024
Economist Pours Cold Water on Kamala Harris’ Explanation for Inflation
It's sheer ignorance from her. Governments control the money supply so the government has to be to blame for any across-the-board inflation
Vice President Kamala Harris blamed price-gouging for high food prices, though experts say Biden administration policies are to blame for the high cost of living and for inflation.
“I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price-gouging on food,” Harris said Friday in Raleigh, North Carolina. “My plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules and get ahead.”
“We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy,” the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting continued. “More competition means lower prices for you and your families.”
But price-gouging is not the reason prices have gone up, according to EJ Antoni, a public finance economist at The Heritage Foundation.
“The prices that businesses are paying have gone up by the same percentage that our prices have,” Antoni told The Daily Signal. “So, all of the cost increases that businesses have faced, they’re simply just passing them on to consumers, and that’s why we’re all paying more.”
Harris highlighted grocery store price increases since 2020, shortly before the Biden administration took office.
“A lot a loaf bread cost 50% more today than it did before the [COVID-19] pandemic,” she said. “Ground beef is up almost 50%.”
The Biden administration is at fault for the increased prices, not food companies, Antoni said.
“The government spending, borrowing, and printing trillions of dollars that it didn’t have to finance it all, that’s what devalued the dollar,” Antoni said. “That’s what caused these tremendous shocks to interest rates that have so distorted the economy and caused so much havoc in supply chains and created all of these additional costs for businesses.”
The vice president promised, if elected, to lower prices by increasing competition in the food industry.
“We will help the food industry become more competitive, because I believe competition is the lifeblood of our economy,” Harris said. “More competition means lower prices for you and your families.”
Antoni wonders why Harris thinks she has to wait until her first day as president to address high prices, when she has been in office for three-and-a-half years.
Harris boasted economic improvement since the Biden administration took office in January 2021.
“We were facing one of the worst economic crises in modern history, and today, by virtually every measure, our economy is the strongest in the world,” the Democrat said.
The Biden administration did not solve an economic problem, Antoni said. They created a problem, and allowed it to run its course.
“Inflation is down—after they ran it up to 40-year highs,” Antoni said. “It still is more than twice what it was when they took office. The problem is not quite as bad as it was before, but it’s still bad.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/16/kamala-harris-blames-price-gouging-high-cost-living-biden/
**************************************************Trump Can’t Allow Kamala to Be the Candidate of Change
Joe Biden made Donald Trump feel fresh and vital.
No matter how commonplace Trump’s tropes and mode of campaigning had become, they seemed compelling compared to the bleached-out president of the United of States who had become a shell of himself.
With the Trump-Biden contrast no longer relevant, the former president is operating in a new, much less forgiving environment. Kamala Harris wants to run a youth-vs.-age and future-vs.-past campaign against Trump, and she has some chance of making it work.
Against Biden, Trump represented the past, but also change. Against Harris, he’s potentially just the past.
It’s not “old” as a matter of age that’s the issue, although all those concerns are now about Trump. Ronald Reagan was old when he took office, but was offering a complete change of direction in policy and exuded a youthful optimism and self-confident patriotism. The problem for Trump is “old” as a matter of feeling familiar, tired and played out.
The Mar-a-Lago press conference last week was a typical, nay, stereotypical, Trump event — Trump looked commanding against a vivid backdrop of American flags, but how many times have we seen that image?
He was a bit of everything — on message and off message, confident and defensive, charming and insulting, and so it went. Again, how many times have we watched it?
Even Trump’s outrages aren’t that surprising. That he went with the “Kamala suddenly became black” line of attack wasn’t exactly predictable, but nor is this kind of thing unexpected.
And, of course, we’ve repeatedly experienced cycles of hope for a new, more disciplined candidate dashed by Trump’s insistence on doing it his way.
Again, none of this mattered so much against a doddering 81-year-old man who a vast majority of the public thought incapable of serving another four years. Biden was the past in everything he said and did.
For her part, Kamala Harris may not really be hip, but she is hipper than Trump. She’s certainly energetic enough for a full slate of campaigning, and she’s presenting herself as a third force: neither Biden nor Trump, a politician with an entirely new “vibe.”
Harris has another advantage. It wasn’t truly possible to cover up Biden’s weakness. Even if Biden wasn’t doing many interviews, he had to be out in public — at international meetings, at White House events and the like. No matter how much the Democrats insisted everything was OK, he could be seen stumbling, wandering and losing his train of thought.
With Harris, Republicans might (for good reason) say that she will lose herself in word-salad incoherence upon her first contact with a challenging interview, but there is no way to establish it without such an interview.
On the teleprompter, she seems just fine. She’s pointed, amusing, determined and lifted by enthusiastic crowds.
Most importantly, Trump was winning a change election against Joe Biden. Now, he’s essentially tied with Harris on who will bring positive change. The new CNBC poll had Harris at 39% on this question and Trump at 38%.
There is plenty for Trump to work with to pull ahead on this metric. People remember his record in office more or less fondly, and Harris has been an integral part of a failed administration and now embraces almost all of Biden’s policies.
This isn’t a case that makes itself, though. It’s not enough simply not to be Kamala Harris, the way it was not to be Joe Biden.
Trump is going to have to make focused attacks that break through and aren’t lost in the haze of pointless controversies. This presents a tactical question: If the choice is between an overly controlled candidate who is relentlessly on message and an ill-disciplined candidate who is off message, is it clear that the former (Harris) is worse than the latter (Trump)?
Trump has a new challenge — his opponent is no longer an aged incumbent president who has worn out his welcome.
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How Gold Can Save the Dollar
Can we save the dollar before central banking kills it?
Yes. It’s surprisingly easy. And, as you might expect, it involves gold.
As federal deficits hit 8% of gross domestic product—unprecedented in peacetime—and our national debt hits $35 trillion—unprecedented in the history of man—even the central bankers realize that this isn’t sustainable.
That we are coming to the day our paper money utopia crumbles.
Historically, from Song Dynasty China to Weimar Germany, when paper dies we return to hard money. Because hard money is the only way to finally kill the money printer.
Happily, we can actually do this without the crash.
The other day Fox Business financial journalist Charles Payne sent me a quote by 1970s Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, who wrote, paraphrasing: It is a sobering fact that central banking has led to more inflation, not less. We did better with the 19th-century gold standard, with passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with “free banking.” The power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money and, ultimately, the power to create is the power to destroy.
This is a fairly striking admission of failure from—by all accounts—the best Fed chair we’ve had since 1913.
A central bank is indeed an extraordinary thing: It’s a privately owned, federally licensed counterfeiter the regime can use to seize literally everything in the world by printing money.
It’s why we have inflation and recessions. It’s why we have Wall Street bailouts and a colossal national debt. It’s why the government has grown to dominate our economy and our lives.
In contrast, under the gold standard we had zero cumulative inflation over 124 years. We had a federal government that was seven times smaller as a percent of GDP. In 1913, we had a national debt of 8% of GDP. Today, it’s 140%—in fact, it’s rising by almost 8% per year.
So how do we get back? Simple: Back the dollar with gold at today’s price—$2,500 per ounce—then mandate that if gold flows out, the Treasury has to buy it back in before the Treasury does anything else—before it pays Ukraine, before it pays interest on the national debt.
Presto.
Why? Because if they keep printing money it creates inflation and gold goes to, say, $2,600 an ounce.
Now, people can make free money by trading $2,500 for an ounce of gold from the Federal Reserve and reselling it for $2,600 on the open market.
Gold flows out, now Treasury has to buy it in at 26.
In other words, they lose money on the money printer.
That means the Fed and Treasury are forced to keep money creation low enough for zero percent inflation—for stable gold.
This means interest rates above inflation—no more paying hedge funds to borrow. It means no more quantitative easing to buy up rich people’s assets, leaving inflation for the poor. It means no more Wall Street bailouts. And, above all, it chokes off the spending cancer of the welfare-warfare industrial complex.
So what’s next? Neither the gold standard, bitcoin standard, or full reserve banking are remotely on the bingo card for the foreseeable future. And, historically, it takes a crisis to put them there.
But it’s important to remember how easy it is to solve our financial catastrophe if and when we get a politician brave enough to try.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/16/how-gold-saves-the-dollar/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
***********************************************
Thursday, August 15, 2024
UK: Sir Keir Starmer’s Liberal Authoritarianism
The United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has wasted no time in revealing his authoritarian nature. His first month in power has, to be sure, featured the worst spate of civil disorder to take place in the U.K. in many years, and, whatever the underlying causes, this undoubtedly required a police response.
But the Prime Minister’s approach to this mini-crisis has been highly illustrative of his character. Almost his first meaningful action when the recent riots broke out was to give carte blanche – through executive fiat – to police forces throughout the country to use live facial recognition technology (which has just effectively been banned by the EU Parliament due to its intrusiveness) to engage in “preventative action” in restricting people’s movements.
Now, we learn that Sir Keir has also set in train a review of the law regulating social media so as to permit the micromanagement of ‘legal but harmful’ speech online, which will likely see social media companies being required to remove content that apparatchiks deem to be ‘misinformation’. His instincts have as a result been revealed to point not towards understanding, or the solution of problems, but merely towards control. Faced with the first opportunity to exercise power, in other words, Starmer has found his knee uncontrollably jerking. And it has jerked in the direction of China.
Starmer, it is plain, is one of those socialists for whom the appeal of socialism lies not so much in its amelioration of poverty, but rather in its provision of a rationale for the imposition of a perfect order on society – the construction of a “great social machine”, as Sydney Webb once put it, within which every individual must be made to fit.
There is the touch of the Javert about him; he is one of those men who, all things considered, prefers the stars, who “know [their] place in the sky”, to people, who have an irritating tendency to exhibit free will. There is also in the air around him a quality that C.S. Lewis called “Saturnocentric”, which Michael Ward summarised as a combination of the “astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory, and serious”. It is no surprise at all that Starmer should once have made his living as England and Wales’s Director of Public Prosecutions: this is a man who would take to the political task of steering public policy regarding criminal prosecutions like a duck to water.
It should also be no surprise that Starmer was once a human rights lawyer. Some have found it difficult to square these two aspects of his character. Silkie Carlo, the prominent civil liberties campaigner, for instance, remarked in a recent interview concerning the use of live facial recognition how strange she found it that Sir Keir, who purportedly is a human rights advocate, would embrace a technology that seems almost designed to usher a Chinese total surveillance system into the U.K.
But this confusion is based on a complete misunderstanding of what human rights are all about. Human rights law long ago abandoned any residual loyalty it might have had to anything so laughably quaint as civil liberties. What human rights promises, indeed, is the exact opposite of civil liberties – namely, the most complete form of tyranny that can be imagined, achieved not in the form of anything so dramatic as individual dictatorship, but in the form of a system of total and continuous regulation of each and every human interaction in the name of perfect autonomy and equality.
Most people do not have anything like an adequate conceptual framework, or even the terminology, to understand this – which is why people like Carlo go so badly wrong in their interpretation of the actions of the Keir Starmers of this world. But I will do my best to elucidate it for you here.
The first thing is to understand what is really meant by ‘liberalism’: that is, the ideology that holds that the purpose of political power, in the form of the State, is to liberate. Here, the important point to emphasise is that, while many people still have a vague notion in their heads that this means that the State should be small, it is of course a recipe for the biggest State that there could possibly be.
The essence of liberalism is the construction of a relationship between the autonomous individual and the State which guarantees, and fosters, that autonomy, and this means that the State must intervene in society in literally every single point to ensure that all individuals maximally enjoy the exercising of their autonomy at any given moment. Any social institution, whether concrete or abstract, which might constrain individual autonomy – family, church, community, employer, business, social norm, cultural taboo – must be broken down insofar as it provides a constraint, with the result being that there is prima facie no barrier that may be permitted to exist anywhere against State action.
The important corollary of this is that since the State must maximise individual autonomy it must also maximise individual equality – in the sense that all individuals must at all times be made to enjoy perfect equilibrium of both opportunities and outcome. Liberation always gestures towards the absolute abolition and prohibition of hierarchy of any kind, because where hierarchies are found to exist, individual autonomy is in some sense or other inhibited for those who are lower in that hierarchy than higher in it. Liberal government must then always work to ensure that nobody can find himself in a position of superior status to anybody else. And liberalism, therefore, in its relentless drive to liberate, also constructs a relationship between the individual and the State in which the latter guarantees to the former that, in perpetuity, it will instantiate itself as a great moderating force in society to ensure that nobody is ever able to occupy a position of ‘privilege’ vis-à-vis anybody else.
The inconsistencies and self-contradictions in all of this are evident to anybody with two brain cells to rub together; it is definitionally impossible to reconcile autonomy and equality in practice, because, since everybody is different and has different sets of abilities, as soon as anybody exerts their autonomy in any meaningful sense it will inevitably produce inequalities. The fact that a free market necessarily produces big differentials in wealth is an obvious example of this.
But this irreconcilability is, as the kids say these days, a feature of liberalism, rather than a bug – it is the reason why there needs to be a liberal State at all. Communists (and this is one of the admittedly good things one can say about Marx and Engels) at least had a notion, as harebrained as it may have been, that there would one day not need to be a State, and that it would “wither away” once scarcity was in effect abolished. Liberalism has no such notion, because it posits the complete regulation by the State of all human interactions in perpetuity. And it needs to do this because it has to always make a plausible claim to be creating the conditions in which the irreconcilable imperatives of autonomy and equality can be somehow reconciled.
Liberals are therefore perfectly happy to accept trade-offs in this regard, because the making of trade-offs itself justifies the ongoing existence of liberal government. There must be somebody (John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Thomas Piketty, etc.) to declare to what extent inequalities in wealth are to be tolerated and on what basis, and to what extent redistribution should occur so as to optimise the relationship between autonomy and equality – and, naturally, a vast administrative State to fine tune that calibration from year to year, day to day, moment to moment. And this, of course, indicates the extent to which socialism and liberalism are tied together – and are really to be thought of as features of the same phenomenon, since liberalism will necessarily entail some degree of socialist redistribution and socialist redistribution will always necessarily take place on the basis of attempts to liberate the weak from economic dominance.
This all means that liberalism is to be understood to be quintessentially adjudicative in nature. The liberal State posits itself as a kind of omniscient and omnipotent referee, constantly umpiring a vast game conducted between millions upon millions of autonomous and equal individuals. It is a permanent, pervasive, and potent third party, always present in any given circumstance to interject so as to make one person a little more equal vis-à-vis some other person or persons, or to make one person a little more autonomous. One cannot escape from it, because escape is what it cannot permit – that would ruin the perfect system of optimisation which is always and everywhere to take place. And it has no principled limit, precisely because liberation itself has no logical limit – liberalism never has anywhere to go but onwards, downwards, and further in.
The result of this is a liberal authoritarianism which people do not really have the vocabulary to describe even as they sense that it is in motion and relentlessly advancing all the time. It has long gone past the point at which it could be rationally justified (there were formal inequalities that needed to be torn down; there were people in our societies who were living in de jure or de facto bondage) and has now shifted into fifth gear, such that we can properly begin to discern its pathologies and disastrous consequences. But the important point to re-emphasise is that ‘liberal authoritarianism’ is not an oxymoron; it is the inevitable playing out of the main predicate of liberalism itself, which is, to repeat, the repudiation of inequality, since equality is the necessary corollary of liberation conceived as the very purpose of government.
This makes human rights the perfect technology of liberal government, and of liberal political reason, because human rights law postulates the existence of a vast network of rights that drape themselves like a blanket over every feature of human existence and thereby always provide the justification for adjudication on the part of the State at any given moment. Everybody has the rights to freedom of association, to health, to education, to non-discrimination, to life, to freedom of expression, to privacy, to food, to housing, and so on and so forth – and the fact that these things cannot be made perfectly reconcilable with one another, and that anybody’s rights have to end where other peoples’ rights begin, allows there to spring into being an entire modulating framework designed to administer the necessary adjustments and compromise between competing rights claims – and it is in this practice that liberal government finds its justification and complete expression.
This happens judicially through the absurd conceit of ‘proportionality’ (whereby courts exercise purported oversight over the trade-offs authorities make between the protection of rights and the ‘public interest’). But ideally it happens internally within the institutions of government themselves (and also, of course, within private institutions), because the very existence of the permanent third party and its known motivations causes people to modulate their own conduct accordingly. Human rights therefore set in train, and legitimate, a total system of government based on the reconciliation and modulation of rights claims that could be made by anyone, against anyone else, at any time. It is the constitutionalisation, as it were, of Alexandre Kojève’s “‘instinct’ or ‘program’ regulating all individuals completely and finally” (as described by Kojève’s biographer, Jeff Love).
This connection between human rights and liberal authoritarianism is not widely understood, but is obvious when one thinks about the way human rights typically feature in our legal landscape – not as a way to restrain State power in general (think about how human rights activists completely vacated the scene during the Covid lockdown era) but as a way to determine who gets what from the State at a given point in time. Human rights do not limit State power per se, but only as a means of shaping the scope of executive decision-making so as to guide it towards liberation and equality – or to help decision-makers in an individual case find an appropriate reconciliation between those two imperatives, or between competing claims.
The appeal of this to somebody like Starmer, who likes everyone to fit nicely together into a grand, intricate and orderly social machine, is obvious – as is the idea that he might be the one who ultimately gets to press the buttons and pull the levers so as to fine-tune that machine to its absolutely perfect modulation. So, the fact that he had a career as a human rights lawyer before entering into politics is absolutely fitting, and there is nothing unexpected or self-contradictory about his apparent lurch towards authoritarianism when in office. Authoritarianism is entirely in keeping with the zealous adherence to human rights – it is just that we do not really not have a way of conceptualising the phenomenon of liberal authoritarianism as such, and therefore imagine the two things to be somehow contradictory when they are in fact closely linked.
In closing, it is worth mentioning something about how democracy fits into this picture. Starmer, like any good liberal authoritarian, does not like democracy. He does not like it in the narrow sense of people voting for things which government puts into effect (overseas readers may not know that he was one of the doughtiest champions of the attempt to overturn the 2016 EU referendum result), and he does not like it in the broad sense of public participation in politics. What he likes is operationalised bossiness, and that is really the stock-in-trade of liberal authoritarian practice at ground level: a supercilious demand for participation in the liberal project which also always imbues the subject with a vague feeling of shame for having failed to realise in advance what was expected of him.
This is why Starmer has taken to the task of suppression of ‘legal but harmful’ speech with such alacrity, and it is this that is likely to set the tone for his period in office. We are going to have to participate in realising the particular vision of autonomy and equality which Starmer’s government have in mind for us, and we are going to have to get used to being chided, in the manner of a bad dog who has made a mess in the kitchen, when we fall short of what is expected of us. We may be allowed to exert our right to freedom of expression in response – but only in the sense that it is modulated by the State-as-umpire, and reconciled with all of the other rights with which it might potentially conflict, and only therefore in such a way that the power of the liberal State over society will be extended, rather than curtailed. The State will get bigger in the economic sense (it always does under a Labour government). But it will also get bigger conceptually, and in its role with respect to the constant supervision of society. It will become both more liberal and more authoritarian – and my strong suspicion is that in five years’ time we will therefore have a much better handle on what liberal authoritarianism entails than we do at present.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/08/14/sir-keir-starmers-liberal-authoritarianism/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
***********************************************
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Vance Proved Why He’s Trump’s Greatest Wingman
While Vice President Kamala Harris dodges the media entirely, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz grapples with the fallout of decades of him lying about his service record, Ohio Sen. JD Vance went into the lion’s den on Sunday and emerged victorious.
Pundits have debated ad nauseam whether former President Donald Trump made the correct choice when he picked Vance as his running mate in 2024. Hopefully, that ended after Vance appeared on regime media’s Sunday shows. A hostile press is never going to be kind to a Republican ticket unless, of course, they align with their globalist agenda that sells out Americans. Vance knew that going in. But unlike Walz, who only pretends to be a warrior, Vance is one.
On Sunday, Vance went on CNN with host Dana Bash and ABC with host Jon Karl. Bash and Karl expected to throw several minutes of gotcha-style questions at him, seemingly hoping they’d have several viral soundbites to bury the Trump campaign. Instead of this happening for them, Vance was able to reach left-wing audiences, constantly being fed a steady serving of Democrat propaganda and expertly combated their narratives. (As Media Defends Marxist Mr. Magoo, Trump Ground Game Quietly Explodes)
Let’s talk about his ABC conversation with Karl first because, arguably, this was the most important discussion between the two. In the 16 minutes Karl interviewed Vance, he never once talked about Walz repeatedly lying about his service record, which has been a viral discussion over the last week after several reports exposed Walz for stolen valor by falsely claiming he deployed to Iraq during the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Walz used these claims to benefit several campaigns and even used a rank he never earned on his Congressional Challenge coin.
Karl completely ignored this glaring problem and decided to focus his last question on Trump’s comments during a recent Montana rally about Walz’s position on parental rights related to so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, which is just a euphemism for state-sanctioned child sex changes.
“And finally, before you go, we commit to this race to kind of sticking to the facts? I mean, I heard Donald Trump give this speech in Montana he just gave, and he said that Tim Walz has signed a letter letting the state kidnap children to change their gender, that- allowing pedophiles to claim, you know, I mean, to be exempt from crimes. This is not true. It’s not remotely true,” Karl said to Vance.
A typical weak-kneed Republican, the ones Americans have been used to for decades, would have likely denounced Trump’s comments or claimed that he misspoke. But Vance didn’t give the expected response. He went on the offensive.
“What President Trump said, Jon, is that Tim Walz has supported taking children from their parents if the parents don’t consent to gender reassignment. That is crazy. And, by the way, Tim Walz gets on his high horse about “mind your own damn business.” One way of minding your own damn business, Jon, is to not try to take my children away from me if I have different moral views than you,” Vance responded. (ROOKE: Police Association In Blue State Is Finally Fed Up With Mayor)
Karl became visibly frustrated. He was then forced to attempt to defend Walz’s insane position, which backfired. Not only was Vance able to support Trump’s claims that Walz did, in fact, support a bill that would allow children to go through sex change surgeries without parental consent, but he also got Karl to admit that while ABC is hell-bent on defending Harris’s VP pick from questions about his record, Harris has refused to sit down for any media interviews to discuss her policies on crime, immigration, or the economy.
Vance did all of this to an audience who would have otherwise never heard this point of view because, again, regime media only give them cooked-up leftist propaganda.
Similarly, Vance took on Bash, who, unlike Karl, brought up the stolen valor attacks against Walz. Bash wanted to defend the Harris camp from the allegations, but Vance refused.
In the interview, Bash initially argues that Walz filed to retire from the National Guard in February 2005, two months before it was announced that his unit would deploy to Iraq. However, Vance pointed out that this claim was debunked on CNN the night before when one of the people in charge of Walz came on their network saying that Walz knew that his unit would deploy in the fall of 2004, months before he filed for retirement.
“Dana, I’m not interested in the ad hominem. I’ve heard from a lot of veterans’ groups who criticize Tim Walz. The question is: he said he served in war and he didn’t. That is a dishonesty. I really- I couldn’t care less what one or the other person says about it. I care about what the truth is. The truth is that Tim Walz didn’t tell the truth, and importantly, Dana, this is about Kamala Harris’s judgment. And I think that when you ask, ‘Why has Kamala Harris allowed the border to be wide open? Why has Kamala Harris supported policies that have promoted the increase in inflation?’ I think it goes to the heart of her judgment, and I think that that’s what we should be talking about,” Vance said.
Once again, Vance was able to turn regime media (this time CNN) into a valuable mouthpiece that exposes Harris, not Trump. It’s Harris who has failed the American people in terms of the economy, open borders, and bad judgment calls. She picked a man who abandoned his troops as they were set to deploy for war. Despite the attempts regime media make to defend her and prop her up, she’s a disaster.
On Sunday, Vance proved he could combat the lies and hold his own against hostile hosts. He defended Trump’s positions and made them relatable to viewers who likely would have never heard them. He was the perfect pick at the right time.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/08/12/rooke-vance-trump-sunday-shows/
*************************************************Win or lose, Vance has sparked a revolution across conservatism
A Leftist perspective with some truth in it below by Timothy J. Lynch, professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
Donald Trump has already made three decisions that will determine how history remembers him. First, he agreed to debate Joe Biden. This revealed a president in such a state of cognitive decline that his party forced him to step aside; beating his replacement, Kamala Harris, will be much harder. He’s thus far proving not very good at it. Was this the Democratic plan all along?
Second, Trump chose to turn his head at just the right moment to miss, by centimetres, a would-be assassin’s bullet; he suddenly (and prematurely, see decision 1) became the inevitable winner in November.
Third, he chose JD Vance as his running mate. He needed a centrist, ideally a governor, to win over the swinging independent voters who hold the key to the White House. Kamala Harris gets this electoral logic. She picked Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor, a progressive who has won over red parts of his state. Instead, Trump went for a bearded 39-year-old, with a thin executive CV, who leftists will demonise as a woman-hating (and cat-hating) far-right “weirdo”. (Vance has insisted he has nothing against cats.)
Sky News host Danica De Giorgio says Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance has “mocked” Vice President Kamala Harris in front of Air Force Two.
I think this third decision, assuming he sticks with it, in the short term, will cost Trump the election. But it will reframe the nature of conservative politics for a generation. And it is for that legacy we will remember Donald Trump, whether he wins or loses on November 5. His remaking of the Republican Party will be how he is written about in 100 years.
No Republican since Ronald Reagan and no Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt has had a deeper and almost certainly lasting impact on their party. Picking Vance, regardless of the electoral outcome, shows us how, in at least three crucial ways, the right has been transformed.
First, on the economy. Economics was what conservatives thought they had got right. They won the cold war with a superior economic system, obviously? Adapt it for the era of peace to come, right? This meant decades of free trade and the deification of globalisation. But, as George Will, the godfather of a now displaced conservatism, bemoaned “the winds of globalisation have casualties, and the Republicans did not address it”. Now they have.
Decades of free trade built up China’s industrial base and defenestrated America’s. Vance’s terrifically readable Hillbilly Elegy has become the most important book about that suicidal decline; Barack Obama’s books are snore-fests by comparison. They tell us about progressive elites and how to entrench them. Vance documents a revolution against those elites, and how to replace them.
Trump-Vance have a focus on trade protectionism and workers’ rights that was the preserve of left-wing populism. Remarkably, Vance has found allies for his war on banks from liberal Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren. Trump may have dismissed her as Pocahontas (nuance on race is not his strong suit); he has picked a running mate who agrees with her on corporate tax cuts and the minimum wage. Vance and his allies have even been chided as “pro-life socialists”.
The Vance nomination is the most enduring political legacy of the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The mortgage-stressed working class has moved into this new, larger GOP tent. According to Vance: “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems. We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach … It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
Second, on culture. Vance’s military metaphor makes clear the second transformation he presages: the embrace of culture war. Left-wing commentators have dismissed Vance as an anti-woman, “superconservative Catholic”. The aversion to him is less that he believes in the rights of unborn children. Rather, Vance is prepared to fight the left on a cultural battlefield – reproductive rights – they assumed they had captured in perpetuity.
The Republican establishment fought shy on abortion. Ronald Reagan, for example, was agnostic on the issue. The new counter-establishment Vance represents has changed this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the Democrats’ greatest intellectual politician. Like Vance, he came from a broken, working-class home. And, like Vance, he acknowledged “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself”.
I’ve assessed in these pages how Christopher Rufo’s new manifesto was a conservative call to arms: fight the left in their own backyard. March back through the institutions stolen by progressives. Reclaim the language. Defy the woke. Vance is those prescriptions made flesh.
Democrats may win in November. But the next several elections will be fought on cultural terrain that Vance’s conservative movement will be much more adept at fighting on.
This will, in turn, alter the nature of the American left. This evolution in American politics is no bad thing and certainly long overdue. It won’t come via the Democratic ticket – despite its unique identity politics dynamics.
Kamala Harris represents a dreary, shopworn progressive consensus. Its failure is evident on the streets of San Francisco. Instead, systemic change will come via conservative forces. There is irony in that.
The more Vance and his compadres speak in the language of the working class left, the more Democrats will have to re-evaluate their capture by educated, middle class elites. The Democratic establishment’s greatest fear is a revitalised Republicanism (a New Right) that combines cultural conservatism with economic security.
The challenge facing the new GOP is the development of a technocratic class – men and women who can run government, rather than simply denounce it – capable of policy design and implementation. Comfortable with Big Tech, Vance sees Silicon Valley as an arena in which to devise New Right policy and foster conservative technocrats. He certainly won’t look for it in the universities. “They are the enemy,” he says.
Third, abroad. Vance will speed up America’s withdrawal from global leadership. American foreign policy has already become minimalist and squeamish. Biden ran away from Afghanistan. He is giving Ukraine enough support to not lose but not enough to win. He is making an Israeli victory over Hamas harder. This trend would almost certainly continue under any new conservative dispensation. If the GFC was the domestic sea in which Vance learned to swim, the botched occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, contemporaneous with it, were his lens on foreign policy.
Because Vance won’t win Trump the centrist voters he needs, the Ohioan looks an electoral liability or at least a nullity. But in picking JD Vance, three decades his junior, Trump has, possibly inadvertently, guaranteed that the transformation of his party, and of American politics, will continue long after Trump leaves the stage.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Tuesday, August 13, 2024
7 Takeaways From Trump’s ‘Conversation’ With Elon Musk
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk had a long “conversation” Monday night with Donald Trump on his social media platform X.
The former president addressed illegal immigration and violent crime, dangerous foreign leaders, the toll of high inflation and taxes, and the need to cut government spending and regulations while encouraging domestic production of oil and natural gas.
These topics and more all came up after Musk and Trump dwelled for over 20 minutes on Trump’s narrow escape a month ago from a would-be assassin’s bullets.
Trump did seem to have trouble focusing on Vice President Kamala Harris as his opponent in the Nov. 5 election, after Democrats pressured President Joe Biden to step aside and he endorsed Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket.
“She’s a believer in the radical Left,” Trump said at one point, “and he wasn’t.”
The number of those who tuned in during the course of the interview wasn’t clear. Toward the end, X showed 30.6 million were tuned in.
Musk has financially supported a pro-Trump political action committee during this race. Though he has not always been a Trump supporter.
Musk has said he was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama, and noted that he reluctantly voted for Biden in 2020. During the Republican presidential primary, Musk supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who eventually bowed out.
Here are seven key takeaways from the Trump-Musk discussion.
1. ‘Government Efficiency Commission’
“They want the American dream back,” Trump said of Americans at one point, talking about soaring prices for eggs, bacon, milk, and other staples in recent years.
Musk focused a bit on something that hasn’t been considered a strong point for Trump on the Right—reining in government spending.
“Inflation is caused by government overspending,” Musk said, then asked: “Would you agree that we need to take a look at government spending, and have perhaps a government efficiency commission that tries to make the spending sensible so that the country lives within its means, just like a person does?”
Trump responded that the government doesn’t routinely negotiate prices the way businesses do, but that he negotiated $1.6 billion in savings on upgrades for Air Force One.
Now, he said, the “dopey suckers” aren’t negotiating government contracts.
Musk pressed again, and this time volunteered his help.
“I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and ensures taxpayers’ hard-earned money is spent in a good way,” Musk said. “I’d be happy to help out on such a commission if it were formed.”
Trump replied, “I’d love it.”
“You, you’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said. “I look at what you do. You walk in, I won’t mention the name, they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ You would be very good. You would love it.”
The Kamala Harris HQ responded in a post on X: “Trump praises billionaire Elon Musk for firing workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions.”
2. ‘Made Me More of a Believer’
Musk began the conversation by asking Trump about the attempted assassination at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
A bullet grazed his right ear, the former president recalled, as he turned slightly to talk about an oversize chart showing illegal immigration numbers during the Trump-Pence administration years with the much higher numbers of the Biden-Harris administration.
“It was a bigger miracle that I was looking directly at the shooter, so [the bullet] hit me at an angle that was far less destructive than any other miracle,” Trump told Musk in the audio interview on X.
One rallygoer was killed and two others wounded by the shooter, and Trump expressed sorrow that they were hit by bullets meant for him.
“For those people that don’t believe in God, I think we’ve all got to start thinking about that,” Trump said. “I’m a believer, but it’s made me more of a believer, I think. A lot of great people have said that to me, actually. It was amazing that I happened to be turned at that perfect angle.”
Musk, who endorsed Trump after the attempt to kill him, called him “courageous” Monday night for standing up and pumping his fist after being hit.
3. ‘Illegal Immigration Saved My Life’
The two talked about the shooting at some length, dwelling on the large chart depicting unlawful border crossings that led Trump to tilt his head in a certain direction.
“Illegal immigration saved my life,” Trump said at one point, prompting laughter from Musk.
Trump regularly campaigns on restoring border security and keeping criminal gangs and drug traffickers from entering the country. The former president also has promised the “largest deportation effort” in history to send home illegal aliens admitted by the Biden-Harris administration.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., had his staff create the original chart for use during a hearing.
“I’ll be sleeping with that chart. That chart was very important for a lot of reasons,” Trump said.
He mentioned several times that Harris had the unofficial title of “border czar” after Biden assigned her early in 2021 to determine the root causes of illegal immigration, a problem that then worsened.
“I saw an ad from Kamala talking about providing border security,” Trump said. “Where has she been for three and a half years?”
“We’re already overwhelmed, Elon. We’re overwhelmed,” the former president said at another point, speaking of illegal aliens admitted by the Biden-Harris administration.
4. ‘Dragged Him Behind the Barn’
Later, Musk used the word “shot” in a figurative way in describing how Democrats forced Biden out of the 2024 race, using a metaphor for putting an injured farm animal out of its misery.
“This was a coup of the president of the United States,” Trump said of Biden, then referred to other top Democrats. “He didn’t want to leave and they said, ‘We can do this the nice way or do this hard way.’”
Musk concurred, saying metaphorically that Biden was shot.
“They just took him out back behind the shed and basically shot him,” Musk said.
Trump began to say, “What they did to this guy … ,” before clarifying that he didn’t want to defend Biden too much.
“I’m not a fan of his, and he was a horrible president, the worst president in history,” Trump said, sounding a familiar theme.
5. ‘Defective Government’
Trump ridiculed the Biden-Harris administration as “defective.”
“We have a defective government. These are defective people,” the 45th president said.
Later, Trump said that in some ways, the U.S. government has become worse than its enemies.
“We have some really bad people in our government,” Trump said. “I’d say they’re more dangerous than Russia or China. We need a smart president, a president that gets it. We are not in danger from those countries because they need us and they need our help.”
Musk did most of the asking of questions during the exchange. However, at one point Trump asked Musk: “You think Biden could do this interview? You think that Kamala could do this interview?”
Musk laughed and responded, “No. They could not.”
Trump replied, “It’s pretty sad.”
“Yes. Absolutely,” Musk agreed.
6. ‘Iron Dome’ for America
Trump said Biden’s comments have made the world less safe, including the president’s talk of Ukraine joining the NATO alliance even as Russia dug in with its invasion of the former Soviet republic.
“Biden had a low IQ 30 years ago. He’s very low IQ now,” Trump said.
“It was so bad the words he was using,” Trump said of Biden. “The stupid threats coming from his stupid face. It could lead to World War III.”
Musk asserted: “People underrate the risk of World War III,” and added, “It’s game over for humanity.”
Trump argued that the biggest threat facing humanity isn’t climate change or global warming, but “nuclear warming.”
Trump brought up an “Iron Dome” for America, using the name of the antimissile system Israel developed as a shield to foil the rocket attacks of its enemies.
“Why shouldn’t we have an Iron Dome?” Trump said. “Israel has an Iron Dome.”
7. President’s ‘Vegetable Stage’
“Now Biden is close to vegetable stage, in my opinion,” Trump said bluntly at one point, perhaps alluding to those who argue that Harris should have succeeded Biden as president by now, rather than just replace him on the ballot.
“I looked at him on the beach [in photos over the weekend] and I thought why would anyone allow him—the guy could barely walk. Does he have a political adviser that thinks this looks good?” Trump said.
“He can’t lift the chair,” Trump added. “The chair weighs about three ounces! It’s meant for children and old people.”
Musk replied, “It’s clearly like we don’t have a president right now.”
Trump added of Harris and her record as vice president, senator, and California attorney general: “And she’s worse than him.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/12/7-takeaways-from-trumps-conversation-with-elon-musk/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Monday, August 12, 2024
Vance on families and illegals
I think Vance is a real asset to Trump. They were powerful answers he gave below
Republican vice presidential contender JD Vance made a case for himself and Donald Trump on Sunday as he faces another week of backlash around his insults regarding “childless cat ladies,” Democrats and Americans without children.
On Sunday, Vance was asked about his comments regarding traditional families in America and decisions made by people who do not fit that mold. It’s a point that has been viewed by the left as a signal to right-wing conservatives, given that both Vice President Kamala Harris and fellow Democrat Pete Buttigieg came to start families through “nontraditional” means: in Harris’s case, through marriage to a single father; in Buttigieg’s, through adoption.
CNN’s Dana Bash questioned the Republican candidate on State of the Union whether he viewed those families as legitimate.
“Of course,” Vance responded, before pivoting to claims that the Harris campaign was lying about the “context” of his remarks. Bash attempted to press him further, but he easily steamrolled past her follow-up.
“Dana, I was raised....one of the first people I gave a hug to after my RNC convention speech was my step-mom,” he said.
“So she’s not childless, then?” Bash asked.
“Of course she’s not childless,” the Ohio senator responded.
Speaking with ABC News, he elaborated further about his broader remarks regarding childless Americans and the “stakes” that they do or do not supposedly have in the country’s future. Vance, in his 2021 remarks to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson, claimed that “we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it” while referring to Harris, Buttigieg and other Democrats — the same people he had just ridiculed for supposedly being “childless.”
“Do I regret saying it? I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has, frankly, distorted what I said,” Vance told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “They turn this into a policy proposal that I never made.”
The senator also discussed with ABC the Republican platform that has caused shockwaves - Donald Trump’s pledge to lead the “largest deportation operation in history” if elected president in November.
Vance and Trump have stated that they want to deport as many as 20 million immigrants living undocumented in the United States. Such an operation would have massive effects on the US economy, culture and communities.
On ABC, the senator was asked what that operation would look like — whether officers would be going door-to-door asking Americans for their “papers.”
"You start with what's achievable," Vance responded. "I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem."
“I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million,” Vance told ABC. “That’s where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.”
Harris, now at the head of the Democratic ticket, has gone on the offense on immigration, as some Democrats have seen blood in the water.
Republicans, they reason, face an unprecedented weakness on the issue after a bipartisan border security compromise that would have given the US president authority to freeze the asylum system was tanked by conservatives earlier this year, on Trump’s behest.
The vice president, speaking in Arizona this weekend, told voters that her administration would pursue “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship” if returned to the White House next year with a Democratic majority in Congress.
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Harris’ Consistent Role in Fundamental Transformation of America
Since Vice President Kamala Harris’ coronation as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, much of the media has been laser-focused on her “vibes.” They are frantically working to ensure that Harris is “unburdened by what has been,” to use her own pet phrase, and persuade voters that she is the answer to all our problems.
However, if they bothered to look, it seems Harris’ actual record in office is quite troubling.
If there is one thing the chameleonlike Harris consistently stands for, it’s wielding the government against the Left’s enemies.
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Yes, Harris has flip-flopped—er, recalibrated—quite a bit in recent days. But she’s been quite consistent since her time as the California attorney general in using high office to target and intimidate political foes and chill free speech.
In a piece published in The Wall Street Journal last weekend, the Journal’s editorial board criticized Harris for her work in the California Department of Justice to force nonprofit organizations to turn over donor information.
“Harris made headlines a decade ago by threatening to punish nonprofit groups that refused to turn over unredacted donor information,” The Wall Street Journal editors wrote. “She demanded they hand to the state their federal IRS Form 990 Schedule B in the name of discovering ‘self-dealing’ or ‘improper loans.’ The real purpose was to learn the names of conservative donors and chill future political giving—that is, political speech.”
Eventually, that led to those nonprofit groups challenging Harris in court. One case made its way to the Supreme Court, after she moved on to the U.S. Senate and was replaced as California AG by Rob Bonta.
“In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021, the high court ruled 6-3 that the [attorney general’s] disclosure demand broke the law. The court pointed out that a lower court had found not ‘a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a Schedule B did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory, or enforcement efforts.’”
Isn’t it interesting that President Joe Biden and Harris have announced plans to “reform”—i.e., decimate—the Supreme Court. It’s almost as if they want to remove any potential checks on their power.
It wasn’t just pro-free market groups such as Americans for Prosperity that Harris targeted. As an editorial in the Washington Examiner noted, she’s worked zealously to target Christians and Christian organizations.
When Harris was in the Senate, she labeled the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, an extremist group. She even demanded one federal court nominee answer for his membership in the Knights of Columbus.
“Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?” Harris accusingly asked Brian Buescher, a federal judge nominee of then-President Donald Trump.
Given that it’s a Catholic organization, one would assume members are pro-life. But I understand that with Biden in the White House, that can be a bit confusing.
Perhaps most telling of all, Harris unleashed California DOJ resources on pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who runs the Center for Medical Progress.
As my colleague Mary Margaret Olohan revealed in a recent report, Harris conducted an elaborate sting on Daleiden after he released videos of Planned Parenthood officials describing how they gruesomely extract and traffic in aborted-baby parts.
Just before the sting, Harris’ office had a meeting with Planned Parenthood officials. Planned Parenthood donated to her campaign while she was attorney general and to her Senate campaign.
Daleiden said in his interview with Olohan that he didn’t think it was a coincidence that there was an escalation of the weaponization of government against pro-lifers once Harris became vice president.
“This is a pattern for her,” he said. “Her weaponization of the powers of her office, on behalf of her powerful special interest sponsors in the abortion industry, to cover up their wrongdoing and persecute the people who want to expose it, that began in California with my case, and I think it’s a pattern that she’s continuing to this day.”
Harris’ record is fully in line with how those on the Left want to transform American institutions and society.
They don’t believe that justice should be blind and that citizens should be treated equally under the law.
No, they think that outlook causes inequality and exploitation. Instead, they believe in various forms of social justice, wherein left-wing philosopher queens dole out punishments and privileges to those they deem undeserving or deserving. Then, we will have equity, so this line of thought goes.
That’s how those on the Left govern when they no longer believe there are limits to their power. They will transform a constitutional republic into a banana republic and call it justice.
Harris has consistently played her part in the fundamental transformation of America. On that, she hasn’t changed.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/11/kamala-harris-has-sordid-record-weaponizing-government/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Sunday, August 11, 2024
Health note
I have been battling episodes of cancer for five years now and it has not killed me yet. Some recent symptoms have however been troublesome and are not congenial to blogging. So my postings henceforth may be more patchy than usual. From now on I will probably post less on my various blogs and do so less often. I intend however to follow some good advice: "Fight, fight, fight!"
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Does Trump know ‘better than the Federal Reserve’?
There are a lot of poitical predictions involved in reserve bank decisions so who better to advise the Fed than the country's leading politician? But there is no question that monetary decisions will ultimately be made by the Fed board alone. As economists say, the president can "jawbone" the Fed but the board remains independent
Donald Trump called for three debates against Kamala Harris, said presidents should have influence over the Federal Reserve and conceded he might be losing support among black women during a news conference meant to recapture the spotlight after his rival picked up momentum.
The former president and 2024 Republican nominee said he agreed to a September 4 debate on Fox News, a September 10 debate on ABC, and a third on NBC on September 25. The ABC debate was previously agreed upon when President Joe Biden was in the race. Mr Trump had called into question whether he would face off on ABC with the Vice-President now at the top of the Democratic ticket.
“I hope she agrees to them,” Mr Trump said during the news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Thursday (Friday AEST). “I think they will be very revealing.”
Ms Harris said she was looking forward to debating Mr Trump on September 10, which she had previously committed to. The Vice-President also said she was open to having another debate, without committing to the dates or networks Mr Trump tossed out.
Mr Trump asserted that he had better instincts than the central bank’s chairman and governors. “I feel that the president should have at least (a) say in there, yeah. I feel that strongly,” he said. “I think that, in my case, I made a lot of money. I was very successful and I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman.”
Mr Trump criticised the Fed, arguing that the central bank had “gotten it wrong a lot”. He noted that he clashed with Fed chairman Jerome Powell while he was in the White House. “I fought him very hard,” he said. But “we got along fine”.
US Studies Centre Research Director Jared Mondschein says the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be a “very different debate” compared to the one in June with Joe Biden.
Mr Trump’s press conference was meant, in part, to draw a contrast with Ms Harris, whom the former president cast as dodging the news media. “She hasn’t done an interview,” Mr Trump said, echoing a line of attack from his campaign in recent days.
Nearly three weeks since Mr Biden dropped out of the race and Democrats coalesced around Ms Harris as the party’s presumptive nominee, the Vice-President hasn’t yet sat for an interview or taken public questions from reporters. She has held large rallies and given statements to reporters on the tarmac while travelling the country, but she hasn’t engaged with the press beyond those events.
Ms Harris’s campaign shot back, saying Mr Trump hasn’t kept up as rigorous a schedule and accused him of focusing on grievances rather than discussing a vision for the country. “It’s why voters will reject him again at the ballot box this November,” said Harris campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa.
Mr Trump had been largely off the campaign trail since his most-recent rally in Georgia last Saturday, when he attacked Republican Governor Brian Kemp as “a bad guy” while characterising Ms Harris as overly liberal and weak on immigration. He was due to hold a rally in Montana on Friday night.
Mr Trump’s news conference followed a briefing by campaign aides for reporters in which they outlined their strategy for winning in November, largely by courting a sliver of undecided voters in battleground states.
“As long as we hold North Carolina, we just need to win Georgia and Pennsylvania,” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio said.
Non-traditional battleground states such as Virginia and Minnesota – which the campaign said were in play when Mr Biden was in the race – remain in play with Ms Harris at the top of the ticket, senior Trump campaign officials said, further underscoring their view that Ms Harris’s recent bump in the polls won’t last. Early polling since the President left the race showed Ms Harris and Mr Trump locked in a dead heat nationally and Harris narrowly ahead in certain swing states.
Mr Trump acknowledged the changing landscape.
“It’s possible that I won’t do as well with black women, but I do seem to do very well with other segments,” he said, adding that he thought he was doing well with Hispanics, Jewish voters and white men. “White males have gone through the roof,” Mr Trump said.
He said he thought he was doing well with black men and might see less support from black females, but he said he could win some over. “I think ultimately they’ll like me better, because I’m going to give them security, safety and jobs,” Mr Trump said.
He played down the significance of abortion as an issue in the election, despite Ms Harris and Democrats making it a focal point.
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When Socialism Fails, the New York Times Blames “Brutal Capitalism”
Venezuela sits on the precipice of a revolution. Nicolas Maduro, the dictatorial president of the South American nation, faced a near-certain ouster at the polling booth last Sunday. Exit polls and unofficial tallies showed the main opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, winning with around 70% of the vote. At the moment, Maduro is still clinging to power by force. An elections commission under his control released its own results, claiming that he squeaked by with 51% of the vote and designating him as the winner. Few Venezuelans accept these fraudulent numbers, and even Maduro’s leftist allies in other Latin American countries are calling foul.
Perhaps sensing his time is limited, Maduro has now turned to a Soviet-style playbook of violent repression as his strategy for remaining in office. In the eyes of the New York Times though, Venezuela’s problems come from a different source. The culprit is not the Marxist strongman who’s desperately clinging to power or even the socialist economic policies that have thrust Venezuela into hyperinflation, poverty, and a massive exodus of its population. To Times reporters Anatoly Kurmanaev, Frances Robles, and Julie Turkewitz, Venezuela’s troubles come from “brutal capitalism.”
This was the conclusion of the newspaper’s coverage of Venezuela’s turmoil on the day of the vote. These three reporters extolled how the Chavismo movement, named after Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, “initially promised to lift millions out of poverty.” “For a time it did,” they declare, “But in recent years, the socialist model has given way to brutal capitalism, economists say, with a small state-connected minority controlling much of the nation’s wealth.”
Note that Messrs. Kurmanaev, Robles, and Turkewitz do not name the “economists” who allegedly diagnosed Venezuela with “brutal capitalism.” Neither do they bother to explain what “brutal capitalism” entails. The Times reporters simply advance their interpretation by declamatory labels. To them, “capitalism” is somehow to blame for the unfolding humanitarian disaster of real-life socialism.
The New York Times’s bizarre interpretation of these events continues a long line of left-wing apologia around the repressive Chavez and Maduro regimes that have ruled Venezuela for a quarter century. Perhaps they had Joseph Stiglitz in mind as their “economist.” In the late 2000s, the Nobel laureate turned far-left pundit gushed with praise about Chavez’s alleged successes in “bringing education and health services to the barrios of Caracas” and did media appearances on the dictator’s behalf to promote a state-run banking scheme that never quite seemed to launch. His lack of self-awareness was on brazen display recently when he penned a new book that falsely portrays Milton Friedman as a “key adviser to the notorious Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet” (in reality, Friedman simply offered counsel to Chile about taming inflation—advice he gave to all manner of governments, left or right). Perhaps Stiglitz, who schmoozed with the Chavistas on an advisory trip to Caracas in 2007, should tend to the beam in his own eye before picking at specks in the eyes of others.
There’s a more fundamental problem with the Times’s reporting. In their strange attempt to reinvent Venezuela’s recent economic record as an outgrowth of “capitalism,” the newspaper ignores the obvious. Nicolas Maduro is an avowed Marxist. In a 2021 speech, he declared Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto “the most important political declaration in 200 years” and professed his fidelity to Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Maduro goes on to sing praises of precursor Marxist regimes, including V.I. Lenin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. He portrays Venezuela as the successor to this legacy and tasks his regime with implementing Marx’s ideas for the 21st century.
Perhaps we should not be surprised to see the New York Times’s Orwellian attempt to reinvent the Maduro regime’s economic ruination as a product of “brutal capitalism.”The newspaper previously deployed a near-identical phrase as part of its 1619 Project, which ascribed plantation slavery to “the brutality of American capitalism.”
As with Maduro today, this historical designation had no basis in economic reality. Most plantation owners saw themselves as part of a pre-capitalist and pre-industrial feudal order—indeed,the slaveowners of the past designated market capitalism as a threat to slavery—just as Maduro deems it a threat to his socialist government today. But quaint concepts such as fact, accuracy, and precision have long ceased to concern the editors at New York’s self-designated “paper of record.” Like the Maduro regime they grovel before and uphold, only the political narrative matters.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Thursday, August 08, 2024
Media Helps Reinvent Kamala Harris in Truth-Optional Campaign
Just when Americans thought they couldn’t be surprised by the press’ bias, Harris’ candidacy has turned them into outright liars, whose in-kind donation is a blanket cover-up for every unpopular policy she’s ever endorsed. And Republicans, who are used to running against the media, have to wonder: Will voters see through the scam?
From defunding the police to banning fracking—even Harris’ assignment as border czar—the Left’s revisionist history has saturated news casts, network interviews, even fact-checkers.
As National Review’s Noah Rothman bleakly put it, “The sense of euphoric inevitability that prevailed when Republicans gathered in Milwaukee for the party’s nominating convention is gone. … The Trump campaign has struggled to break into the Kamala Harris-dominated news cycle in a positive way. Republicans are resigned not just to a race against a tougher opponent but to an array of cultural and journalistic institutions acting with reckless disregard for their reputations to shield Harris from scrutiny. It’s all rather depressing.”
Harris’ dubious record is being scrubbed clean by an army of media water-carriers, who insist that GovTrack’s most liberal senator in 2019 didn’t actually mean those things she said about “Medicare for All,” voting rights for felons, bans on offshore drilling, and gun control.
In one of the more embarrassing displays, CNN’s Daniel Dale even claimed that “Harris was never made [President Joe] Biden’s ‘border czar,’” adding, “In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment.”
“I know it’s a lie. You know it’s a lie. They know it’s a lie,” Becket Adams writes. “That they never bothered to correct this three-year-old ‘misconception’ until she became the presumptive Democratic nominee gives the game away. But the all-too-obvious timing of the thing is not stopping them from trying to revise her record anyway.”
One of Biden’s most feckless Cabinet officials, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, tried to deny the same reality, insisting, “Let’s be very clear about this because there has been a lot of mischaracterization. She was not in charge of the border.” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., on MSNBC, was even more disingenuous, telling MSNBC, “She wasn’t the border czar, but, boy oh boy, did she do a great job at the border.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., could only shake his head. They’re all “trying to rewrite history,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s “This Week on the Hill.” “And you see all the left[ist] media doing this too. President Biden tapped Kamala Harris to be the border czar. She doesn’t have many jobs as vice president, and that’s one of the few things he gave her. The border is a mess. [She was told to] go figure it out. And she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t even go down to the border for so long. She ignored this problem.”
The Left is hoping everyone forgets that “she is for open borders,” Scalise insisted. “She’s been very vocal about wanting to legalize people who just roam into the country and giv[e] them free stuff. And by the way, it’s angering most people in America.” The media is “going to try to change history. Sorry,” the House leader said. “They’re not going to be able to get away with it.”
And yet, as Rothman pointed out, “There is no pressure on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to sit for interviews, hold press conferences, or even merely speak extemporaneously for more than a few sentences. Even what may be Harris’ foremost vulnerability—her inauthenticity—is presented as an asset.”
His colleague, Rich Lowry, thinks this is the natural outgrowth of the press “elevat[ing] her from also-ran vice president to savior of the republic in the space of about 12 hours a couple of weekends ago.” Now, trusting that the press won’t challenge her on anything she says, Harris has the audacity to claim she’s the tough one on immigration.
At an Atlanta rally, Biden’s vice president actually said, “I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week. Any day of the week, including, for example, on the issue of immigration. … Donald Trump,” she continued, “has been talking a big game about securing our border. But he does not walk the walk.”
As Lowry bemoans, Harris’ “sociopathic dishonesty” on the border “has not been met with a flurry of fact checks, nor have editors been zealously adding the word ‘falsely’ in front of her claims. No, she’s flipping the script, and going on offense, and punching back.” So why not “try to get it to swallow an even more outlandishly implausible notion?” he wondered.
But how long can Harris outrun the facts as troves of videos, sound bites, and speeches burn down the straw woman the press has built?
“As we get closer to November,” Scalise warned, there are three issues that are “crystallizing everywhere you go. And No. 1—far and away—is the border. People want to get this border secured. It’s madness what’s going on at the border, and that comes up no matter what part of the country you’re in.”
And as the stock market freefalls, images like Harris in 2023 saying she’s “very proud of Bidenomics” will be hard even for the magicians of the media to erase. As Scalise says, the second biggest issue on voters’ minds is “inflation, the cost of things.”
And whatever part of the country you go into, they’re complaining about grocery prices. They’re complaining about gas prices and energy prices, [and] just cooling their home in the summer. I mean, these are problems that were created by the Biden-Harris administration. Everybody knows that. … [T]his is where Kamala Harris is going to have a real problem. She was with Joe Biden helping be the architect [of these policies]. Look, she was the deciding vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. She can’t run away from these things—the policies that created the inflation, that when you go to the grocery store, you’re paying 30% more than when Biden took office.
Add that to the explosive situation in the Middle East, and frankly, the House’s second-in-command warned, “I don’t remember a time when America’s projected so much weakness to so many of our friends around the world. … You see what Russia did with Ukraine. You see what Iran, through their proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis—have done to Israel. And then, of course, you see what China is doing to allies like Taiwan. So all of our enemies are taking advantage of the weakness being projected.”
“So it’s a dangerous place right now, and we’re in a much more dangerous position because of the weakness projected by Harris and Biden. And I think that’s going to be a big factor knowing how strong President Trump was. [There were] no new wars when Donald Trump was president. Our friends knew that we had their back. And we did, by the way, have their back because we weren’t letting the bad guys run roughshod around the world.”
So the Left’s strategy is simple: Change the subject.
They really are going to be focused on how they can divide the American people between now and Nov. 5, because they don’t want the American people talking about the issues people care about. … And the reason that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden don’t want to talk about it is because those problems were created by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. The inflation, high energy prices, open border, all of those are self-created problems by the Biden-Harris ticket. And again, you go back four years ago, we did not have those problems.
When it comes to Harris’ campaign, “They’re going to want to talk about abortion every day. They’re going to want to talk about mandating [electric vehicles], and Jan. 6. And the American people are saying, ‘Look, I’ve got real problems that you helped create. And I want to talk about those problems.’”
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New British PM presides over the collapse of neo-Marxism
Labour in the United Kingdom are presiding over the potential dissolution of civil peace. Instead of deescalating tensions, Keir Starmer – the most left-wing Prime Minister to reside at 10 Downing St – has chosen to spin facts into fearmongering about the far-right.
Starmer’s poor response to the tension on the streets has revealed a leader who is both startled and stupefied. This makes him dangerous.
Instead of addressing Islamism and the apparent failure of multiculturalism, or even the genuine safety concerns of citizens, Starmer has been smack-talking the British working class.
Instead of acknowledging and acting on widespread concerns about mass immigration and two-tier policing, Starmer wants to usher in the Soviet surveillance state.
This over-reach shows that Labour has no idea how to deal with radical Islam, especially when its members protest on the street expressing an intolerable hatred for Israel.
Labour have been politely feeding the radical crocodile for decades, hoping it would never eat them.
Today, Starmer is shifting blame onto the victims.
When the Left cry ‘far-right extremism’ it’s mostly misdirection. They don’t want the public to see that the root cause of social division is, and has been, leftism.
For years, the Left have told us you’re either an ‘oppressor’ or the ‘oppressed’.
For years the Left – via intersectionality – have divided us.
For years, we’ve been told, you’re either an ally to left-wing ideology, or you’re the enemy.
This is why they’re blaming the largely fictional ‘far-right’ for social division.
The hope is you won’t notice their smiles, lies, and hi-fives.
‘Diversity is our strength’ works great in Retail, but no so much in society.
I have long argued that the ideas of Marx and Mohammad are incompatible with Christian civilisation.
Quality, substance, and truth, still outranks, quantity, appearances, and the half-truths of hagiography.
What we’re seeing unfold across the West is a consequence of the ‘get God out of politics’ brigade badgering on about ‘don’t talk to me about religion and politics!’
I would argue that this violent storm is also part of the dangerously ignorant, post-modern ‘go along to get along’ ethos.
Starmer, and the whole Westminster crowd, have no one to blame other than their own wilful ignorance.
British authorities have had plenty of advanced warning. None so profound, nor as recent, as the debanking of Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman’s brilliant criticisms of multiculturalism.
Socialist Starmer’s gaslighting of reasons, and citizen dissent, will go down as one of the greatest misdirection’s about cause and effect in history; right next to ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/starmer-presides-over-the-collapse-of-neo-marxism/
**************************************************Don’t be fooled by Tim Walz’s blandness
Roger Kimball
OK, it’s August 6, the anniversary of the detonation of Little Boy over the city of Hiroshima in 1945. That marked the end of World War Two. (I know, it took one more bomb and a little more time, but August 6 was the gang plank to the signing of the act of surrender aboard the Missouri.)
Fast forward to August 6, 2024. As of 9:25 ante meridiem there have been no huge detonations. True, the market has yet to open. If we have a repeat of yesterday cautious folk will lock windows on the upper stories in the buildings where the financial experts congregate.
But we do have a little whimper of news, a tiny pssst of a political crepitation. Kamala Harris has just chosen Tim Walz, tapioca progressive and governor of Minnesota as her running mate. Of course, what I mean by Harris has “chosen” is that the Committee that just installed her as the Democratic nominee, and that governs us, has chosen.
Don’t let Walz’s blandness fool you. He is a certifiable (and, yes, I am cognizant of the aura of equivocation surrounding “certifiable”) left-winger. His biggest achievement seems to have been dipping his hands into taxpayers’ pockets to pay for breakfasts for schoolchildren “regardless of income.” His dazzling record otherwise includes dragging his feet on deploying the National Guard after the George Floyd riots alongside progressive priorities such as enshrining the right to gender-transition minors.
Harris chose Walz in order to bolster her standing in the Midwest. Will that work? It depends how long the “don’t-pay-any-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain” show continues. The Dems can claim to have won within the margin of fraud in 2020 only because they were able to keep Biden out of the public eye. Will they be able to do the same with Harris? The jury is still out. They are trying mightily.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/dont-be-fooled-by-tim-walzs-blandness/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Wednesday, August 07, 2024
Another deletion
Google have now wiped out my "Australian Politics" blog. It will however continue to be available in my backups. See:
http://jonjayray.com/ozaug24.html
And more generally via:
http://jonjayray.com/
I guess it said too much about Covid. I have asked them to reinstate it and if they do I will not again post content about Covid there
Kamala Harris’s pick of running mate Tim Walz is a political gift to Republicans
In what is expected to be a close presidential election in November, Harris bizarrely passed over the governor of the most critical battleground state, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a popular Jewish centrist Democrat who advocated for school vouchers and abolished university credentials as requirements for most public sector jobs.
Instead, she chose to elevate a man few Americans had even heard of until last week, whose relatively radical political record in office places him firmly on the far left of the Democrat party, handing a gift to Republicans less than three months out from polling day.
Consider Walz’s long list of policy ‘achievements’ and political stances that have already gifted Republicans with the attack slogans ‘Tampon Tim’ and ‘Make America Burn Again’.
As governor, Walz signed laws that required tampons in boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota schools, and supported legislation that would see parents in effect lose custody of their children if they refused to approve gender reassignment surgery. He declared Minnesota a “trans refugee state”.
During the Covid-19 pandemic he oversaw among the most draconian lockdowns and vaccine mandates in the nation, policies which however popular at the time, haven’t aged well. He even set up a hotline for the residents of his state to snitch on anyone who was breaking the rules. Last year he signed state legislation that permitted abortion up until the moment of birth.
He’s on the record supporting the ‘defund the police’ movement which emerged following George Floyd’s death in May 2020 in Minnesota’s biggest city Minneapolis, during which he waited three days before calling in the national guard to stop riots that caused massive damage and destruction.
His wife Gwen Walz even recalled savouring the moments in solidarity with the rioters. “I could smell the burning tires … I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening,” she later told a journalist when looking back on the incident.
At a time when American concerns about illegal immigration are at an all time high, Walz signed laws as governor that provided free health care, drivers licences and university education for undocumented immigrants. He tried to lift income tax as governor and supported policies to phase out fossil fuels.
Democrats were apparently impressed with his political smarts in coming up last week with the term “weird” to describe Republicans, but his past stances suggest the term might easily be applied to him
For Harris to be successful in November Walz will need to play well in the critical midwestern battle ground states near Minnesota, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which are considered critical to victory.
Republicans have already started to cast Harris as the ‘most radical candidate ever’, and it’s far from clear her choice of Walz helps to dispel that characterisation.
After all, he’s the creature of the sole state that Ronald Reagan couldn’t win in his 1984 landslide.
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Josh Shapiro, Another Victim of Unforgiving Identity Politics
Kamala Harris has made her vice-presidential pick, and it is Tim Walz. In doing so, she forewent the popular Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, reportedly her second choice, who is currently presiding over a crucial swing state with two-thirds of independents approving of him.
Any number of reasons could be given to choose Walz, a former teacher and very Midwestern-looking white man, over the young Shapiro, but one clearly stands out: Shapiro’s Judaism and adamant support for Israel.
In the 2000s, much was made of Cuban Americans and how crucial they were to what at the time was the crucial swing state of Florida.
American Cuban policy was disproportionately distorted through the lens of the small minority of emigres who came to disproportionately populate Florida and the city of Miami—and who split very evenly between Democrats and Republicans. They were the “swing minority” of the time.
Judging by the Democrat senator’s action, she and her campaign see a new minority in the new swing states—the Rust Belt of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota that have a large contingent of Arab Americans.
The states themselves, although cycling back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, also have constituencies that elected “Squad” members like Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
Notably, both these congresswomen have been vocal in their disdain for Israel, with Omar saying, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel,” and Tlaib calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide.”
Tlaib’s district has 74,449 people who speak Arabic, nearly 10% of the entire district. Omar’s district has some 32,000 people who speak Somali or other languages from that region of Africa.
Many of these voters are livid about America’s participation in Israel’s war against Gaza, with 64% of Muslim voters saying their sympathy “lies entirely or mostly” with the Palestinians (less than 2% support the Israelis).
Shapiro, unfortunately, expressed support for bills that would penalize college students for speaking out or protesting against Israel, even boycotting Israeli-made products, as the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement prescribes.
He said of the protesters: “We have to query whether or not we would tolerate this if this were people dressed up in KKK outfits or KKK regalia.”
Comparing anti-Israel protesters to the KKK is not the best way to curry favor with the Arab American constituency. In truth, however, Shapiro may simply find himself on the wrong end of the contemporary understanding of identity politics that has entrenched itself in progressive Democrat politics.
Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s an age when antisemitism was a crucial issue and Holocaust survivors were assimilating into American culture, Shapiro dealt with a cultural context in which more Americans supported Zionism, or the right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland, with criticism over Israel’s policies being less prominent.
One 2021 survey found that 38% of Jewish Americans under the age of 40 believe Israel is an “apartheid state,” while only 13% over 65 do.
He perhaps thought the Democratic establishment would have his back as he decried the antisemitism of the campus protesters. In a move of profound confidence (and maybe even arrogance), he revised his employee code of conduct to bar state employees from demonstrating “scandalous and disgraceful” behavior, right after he sent a May 8 email to colleagues calling for “moral clarity” against “antisemitism” and “hate speech.”
Unfortunately, to a particularly mobilized group of progressive anti-Israel voters, accusations of antisemitism are seen as an impediment to their rights to freely demonstrate against what they see as Israeli-committed genocide and American support thereof.
Witold Walczak, the legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, criticized Shapiro for likening protesters to true antisemites: “If an employee off the job posts, ‘From the river to the sea,’ is that something the governor would consider disgraceful and scandalous?” he said.
Shapiro is also harmed by the fact that he himself is Jewish. Although politics is separate from one’s religious beliefs, Walz, who is Lutheran, is less likely to face immediate scrutiny over his reported support for Israel, saying that support for Israel is “not a Democratic or Republican issue,” according to the Minnesota Post.
Certain segments of the Democratic Party are even engaging in speculation of the notion of having too many Jews so close to the president. NBC News reported on the condition of anonymity a Jewish official expressing what he believes are real voter concerns over this issue.
“The two closest people to the president being Jewish—what long-term impact does that have on us?” the official said, referring also to Harris’s husband, Jewish-American lawyer Doug Emhoff.
This is a wild speculation, but it has basis in history: Winston Churchill once warned his prime minister, David Lloyd George, who was serving as minister of munitions, not to appoint an overbalance of Jews to the Cabinet. In a letter to Lloyd George, he wrote, “There is a point about Jews which occurs to me—you must not have too many of them.”
If Harris skipped over Shapiro, a longtime friend and correspondent in the National Democratic Attorneys General Association, because he is Jewish and a supporter of Israel, she would be acknowledging a reality in the Democratic Party: Critical votes in swing states would be lost if she appointed someone perceived to be on the side of Israel.
The anti-Israel protests have made their political mark and have ushered in a new identity politics movement that will reset our country’s social politics for the next generation and beyond.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/06/josh-shapiro-another-victim-of-unforgiving-identity-politics/
*******************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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