This document is part of an archive of postings by John Ray on Dissecting Leftism, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written.
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August 29, 2024
Time for Never Trumpers to Drop their Conservative Charade
Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, is the most liberal nominee for president in history.
She has ardently supported Medicare for All, also known as a complete federal government takeover of health care, even though she has tried to walk it back in this election cycle. Philosophically, self-proclaimed conservatives have argued vehemently against this policy and the experience of Covid should have given the practical reasons to back the rhetoric.
She is on record as opposing hydraulic fracturing and the Biden-Harris energy policy is one that makes the country more dependent upon electricity generation while ending the most reliable sources to generate electricity. With the key Electoral College state Pennsylvania being a major economic beneficiary of fracking Harris now claims to be against banning the process. GOP “leaders” claim to oppose the Green New Deal destruction of fossil fuels generation, and pretend to understand that reliance on unreliable sources of energy puts our nation at risk.
She has proposed price controls on food as a solution to inflation. You can’t find a single conservative leader in America who believes that the government can do a better job of pricing commodities than the market, and that food price controls don’t mean food shortages. Not even the Washington Post thinks this emphasis on price “gouging” is a good idea.
Kamala Harris is an abortion extremist who as the California Attorney General raided the home of an independent journalist who uncovered an elaborate business venture by Planned Parenthood to market and sell baby body parts from aborted children. Kamala Harris did not prosecute Planned Parenthood, but the journalist who uncovered and videotaped the sickening practice of selling off body parts as if aborted children were human parts manufacturers.
On taxes, she has embraced taxing unrealized capital gains. An example of an unrealized capital gain would be to impose a tax on a homeowner on any appreciation of the value of their home even though that money is only a paper gain and not in their bank account.
Also, the Tax Foundation found that Harris’ pledge to end the Trump tax cuts will mean a tax increase for most Americans. In fact, the bottom half of taxpayers would have their average tax rate raised to 4 percent from the current 3.4 percent. Married couples with two children making a joint income of $85,000 a year would see their taxes go up by $1,661 a year, the equivalent of almost 2 percent of their entire pre-tax salary for the year.
And of course, the Biden border Czarina Harris has seen 10 million illegals encountered at the border since she was given stewardship of the border crisis by President Biden. Note that this does not include the estimated 2 million illegals who got away after being observed by the Border Patrol. It is so bad that Harris is trying to deny any part in the Biden border fiasco, but not even Google can make the news clips of her appointment go away.
It is really hard to find a screwball, California idea that Harris hasn’t supported, including banning gasoline powered cars, which the Biden-Harris administration would put out of business by 2037, two years after California banned them.
All of this does not even include the Biden-Harris weaponization of the Justice Department and intelligence agencies against their political opponents, the on-going censorship and manipulation of social media platforms to promote the left’s political agenda, or her adamant opposition to the Second Amendment. In fact, it is hard to find a part of the Constitution that Harris actually supports.
Given the above, any person who endorses Kamala Harris for president can no longer call themselves a conservative in any way, shape or form. They are not. They are massive government enablers unable to get over the fact that Donald Trump defeated them in a primary election in 2016 and again in the primary of 2024.
The question that the Liz Cheneys of the world need to answer is whether they were lying when they claimed to be pro-life, support free markets, lower taxes, less federal government control, gun rights, energy independence and the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.
Even those with the worst cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome should be able to look at the policies of Kamala Harris and reject them outright. Those with the worst cases have the option of voting third party – maybe the pot party (err, the Libertarian Party) is high enough to earn your vote. But endorsing Kamala Harris is admitting that everything you said was important no longer matters, and that you support the likely final stage of the fundamental transformation of America because … Donald Trump.
I can no longer take those seriously who have embraced the New Age Harris who rejects constitutional governance in her musings about being unburdened by the past
The very soul of America is at stake, and there is no room in the fight to preserve the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and the ideal that all are created equal endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights for those who would sacrifice our fundamental liberties because they don’t like mean tweets. Now, more than ever, in the words of Ronald Reagan, this is our time for choosing.
The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/08/time-for-never-trumpers-to-drop-their-conservative-charade/
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JD Vance tells Kamala Harris to 'go to hell' after her campaign takes aim at Trump over Arlington incident
ERIE, Pa. — Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) told Vice President Kamala Harris she “can go to hell” Wednesday if she wanted to criticize former President Donald Trump for attending a ceremony honoring the fallen 13 servicemembers who died during the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Vance’s swipe came after the Trump campaign reportedly got into an altercation with a cemetery official at Arlington National Cemetery, who tried to stop them from filming and photographing in Section 60, the burial site for military personnel killed while fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In an interview with CNN, a spokesperson for Harris, Michael Tyler, called the incident “pretty sad” and “not surprising.”
The VP pick was asked to comment on the incident at a campaign event in Erie, Pa. when he became visibly frustrated and sniped that the Democratic presidential nominee “can go to hell” if her team wanted to use it as an opportunity to attack Trump.
He then hit back at Harris for not firing anyone responsible for the withdrawal that happened under her watch.
“The other thing that our veterans care more about is that three years ago, 13 brave innocent Americans died. And they died because Kamala Harris refused to do her job and there hasn’t been a single investigation or a single firing,” he said.
“Kamala Harris is disgraceful. We want to talk about a story out of those 13 brave innocent Americans who lost their lives? It’s that Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened. And she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?”
She “can go to hell” he scoffed.
Vance also insisted that the incident was exaggerated by the media.
“The altercation at Arlington cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” he said, saying the Gold Star families wanted Trump there and that the incident was not an “insult” to the memories of the fallen servicemembers.
The Ohio senator said that an Arlington National Cemetery staff member “had a little disagreement with somebody” but that the media ran with it to create a “national news story.”
On Tuesday, NPR reported that two Trump campaign staff members “verbally abused and pushed” aside a cemetery official who tried to prevent staffers from filming and photographing while the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony.
A spokesperson for the Arlington National Cemetery told The Post that there was an “incident,” that a “report has been filed” and that “federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.”
The Trump team has insisted that the individual who confronted the campaign about photography was “suffering from a mental health episode” and that there was “no physical altercation as described,” communications director Steven Cheung said.
One Gold Star family member who was at the cemetery with Trump backed up the campaign’s version of events, and claimed the cemetery staff was “lying.”
“We are the ones that invited Trump. He didn’t invite himself,” Darin Hoover, the father of Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, told The Post in a phone interview on Wednesday.
“We invited him because we knew that he had our backs, he supports us. He cares about us.
“While I was there, I didn’t witness any, any physical altercation or anything like that. And quite frankly, the Arlington staff is lying. I mean, it’s just, it’s a flat-out lie,” Hoover fired back.
“We wanted the pictures to memorialize, you know, what President Trump had said and done and … that moment where he’s paying his respects to our children,” Hoover continued.
The Gold Star family member also said Trump’s support is “a far cry more than what the current administration has done” — which is “absolutely nothing.”
“The current administration wants to sweep it under the rug and make sure it stays buried,” Hoover said.
Attendees at the Erie rally, meanwhile, told The Post that Vance’s military experience and him being a Marine veteran is a positive for the Republican ticket.
Gene Seip, 69, a business owner born and raised in Erie, said that “one of the demographics he’s drawing is military people.”
Chris Knight, 68, is the head cook at a school in Corry, Pa. She brought a hard copy of Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” with her and said that she’s a fan of the senator, not just Trump.
Vance is “adding to the veterans,” she said, noting that her son was in the military and that “it’s important that we keep our kids here and only send them away if they have to go.”
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August 28, 2024
Campaign lays bare debate over what it means to be a ‘real American’
JD Vance introduced himself to the nation as a son of poor Kentucky coal country with family roots going back generations. Kamala Harris introduced herself as the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, one of them “a brown woman with an accent” who arrived with dreams of becoming the scientist who cured breast cancer.
These details, laid out at the two parties’ national conventions, weren’t just intended to fill in the biographies of the faintly known Republican nominee for vice president and Democratic nominee for president. Rather, they were part of the two parties’ explanations for why they would take the nation in radically different policy directions.
The two presidential campaigns, at the conventions and in other messages, have offered far different visions of what it is to be American, part of a battle over which agenda serves the nation best. To Vance, the “source of American greatness” is the bonds built over generations of people connected to their “homeland,” which he said must be defended against imported foreign labour, imported energy and trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. To Harris and her allies, the American story is often about people overcoming racial and economic hurdles, whose aspirations deserve targeted aid from the government.
Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, has prominently taken up the debate over American identity by portraying Harris herself and her policies as outside the mainstream.
Deriding her economic plan as a form of Soviet-style governance, he has continually dubbed her “Comrade Kamala” and recently posted an image online casting the Democratic convention as a communist rally, with Harris as its leader. He has contended that she took on her Black identity only recently, suggesting she is deceitful in presenting herself to the public.
“He’s trying to ‘other’ Harris” – make her seem alien in her identity and values, said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who opposes Trump. She said Harris had responded in the convention by “leaning into what it means to be an American, how American she is, how she’s a unique American story. And that’s how you overcome, I think, his attempts to ‘other’ her.”
Trump has also proposed the largest mass deportation program ever of people in the U.S. illegally, describing them as a threat to safety and the American way of life.
Vance, meanwhile, used the GOP convention to tell the story of a family rooted to the land for generations, using it to argue in part for protecting the nation’s native-born citizens and their values.
Vance talked about the cemetery in Eastern Kentucky, near his family’s ancestral home in one of the nation’s poorest counties, where he expected to be buried one day next to people born at the time of the Civil War. He put the shared history of the people there at the centre of his vision of America.
“America is not just an idea,” Vance told the Republican convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” While accepting immigrants is part of the American tradition, he said, “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms. That’s the way we preserve the continuity of this project from 250 years past to hopefully 250 years in the future.”
Harris’s convention speech, by contrast, leaned into the idea that her story of a first-generation, bi-racial child advancing to high office embodies America’s promise of offering opportunity to all.
Harris has proposed a sweeping package of tax cuts for parents, aid to first-time home buyers and access to capital for small-business owners that she suggested would help people who had few chances for advancement. “Opportunity is not available to everyone,” she said she learned as a child. “That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.” The two party conventions also offered a more direct engagement in the battle to define American identity. When Hulk Hogan, the retired WrestleMania star, took the stage shortly before Trump accepted the GOP nomination, he wore a shirt that said “Real American.” He then explained what the term meant to him.
“I found out I was in a room full of real Americans,” he said, referring to the convention hall and the loyalty of GOP delegates to Trump. “When Donald J. Trump becomes the president of the United States, all the real Americans are going to be nicknamed Trumpites, because all the Trumpites are going to be running wild for four years,” he said.
Democrats left it to Barack Obama to give the reply. “Donald Trump wants us to think that this country is hopelessly divided between us and them, between real Americans who of course support him and the outsiders who don’t,” the former president told his party’s convention. He urged the audience to reject that idea.
Democrats also responded by trying to paint Trump as the candidate who is outside the mainstream, given his efforts to denigrate Harris and her policies. Michelle Obama, among others, presented Harris’s life story as an example of America’s promise, rather than foreign to it. “It’s the story of the vast majority of Americans trying to build a better life,” the former first lady said.
She added: “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be American.” The convention also put Harris’s great-nieces on stage to explain the correct way to say the candidate’s first name (it is COMM-a-lah) – an implicit rebuke to Trump, who often mispronounces the name and has said “I couldn’t care less” about doing so.
Michelle Obama went further and tried to flip the script on claims by some Trump allies – and amplified by Trump himself – that Harris is a “DEI candidate,” a claim rooted in the belief that minority groups unfairly use racial preferences to advance. She implied that it was Trump who had received special preferences based on his birth that aren’t available to others.
“We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth,” she said.
Vance concluded his speech by saying his family represents “generations of people who have fought for this country, who have built this country, who have made things in this country,” and whose commitment to the country is more concrete than an abstraction or idea. He said that “America is a nation, and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first,” whatever the colour of their skin.
Vance is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha Chilukuri Vance, while Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, immigrated from Slovenia.
The night after Vance spoke, Trump expanded on the details of putting those interests first, promising “massive tax cuts for workers” and new tariffs on imports, among other measures. “We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation,” Trump said.
His vision of improving America centred in large part on protecting its territorial integrity. He said he would secure the border and deport undocumented immigrants, who he said made the nation more dangerous and who squeezed Black, Latino and union workers out of their jobs. Previously, Trump had accused Biden of allowing migrants into the country to “sign them up to get them to vote in the next election.” “At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare, and fully restore the sacred and sovereign borders of the United States of America,” he said.
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Kamala Harris Never Mentioned Inflation In Her Acceptance Speech, And At This Rate, She Never Will
By Robert Romano
Upon accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination for 2024 on Aug. 22 in President Joe Biden’s stead, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a short speech wherein she never mentioned inflation by name even though it is by far the top issue in the campaign alongside the economy among voters, according to recent polls.
She dared not.
In the most recent Economist-YouGov poll taken Aug. 17 to Aug. 20, inflation and prices still remained the top concern among voters, at 26 percent and the economy and jobs at 10 percent. Immigration is at 13 percent, health care at 9 percent, climate change at 8 percent and abortion at 8 percent.
Among those who said inflation and prices were the top issue in the campaign, Trump leads them by almost 35 points, 61.15 percent to 26.5 percent.
Elsewhere, 47 percent of voters say they are worse off financially than they were a year ago. Among those voters, they break for Trump by more than 44 points, 66.8 percent to 22.5 percent.
Whereas, among those who said they were financially the same as a year ago, 37 percent, they favor Harris by 35 points, 60.8 percent to 25.7 percent. Among those who said they were better off, 15 percent, they favor Harris by more than 68 points, 79.7 percent to 11.5 percent.
That largely breaks down along party lines, with 64 percent of Republicans saying they are worse off and 29 percent of Democrats. Among independents, critically, 44 percent say they are worse off, 37 percent say about the same and 11 percent say better off. 8 percent are unsure.
Critically, 23 percent of Harris supporters say they are worse off. That could create an opening for Trump, since he is talking about the inflation and prices issue. Especially, since by every measure, personal incomes have definitely not kept up with consumer inflation even when government transfer payments are included, only increasing 18.2 percent since Feb. 2021 whereas prices are still up 18.9 percent, according to data respectively collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A good question might be what Harris can say to those who say they are the same or better off but still favor Trump, 22 percent and 4 percent, respectively, without disaffecting those of her own supporters who say they are worse off. To get there, she would need to acknowledge the weak economy.
So far, the way Democrats appear to have chosen to solve this dilemma is simply by not addressing it. But that might only go so far if economic anxiety increases as the election gets closer.
Suffice to say, if the election comes down to better off or worse off, clearly more Americans say they are worse off than better off, and could give Trump a slight edge, especially if he can persuade some of those saying they are no better off or are better off, to ask for their support to help those out who are not doing too well by taking measures to reduce costs and increase production.
And then there is all the spending that has taken place since 2021, including $1.9 trillion on the American Rescue Plan for more helicopter money and another $891 billion of green subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
On April 29 at the Economic Opportunity Tour in Atlanta, Ga. Harris stated, unironically, “we are in the process of putting a lot of money in the streets of America…” Trump can ask, does that help inflation?
Trump’s advantage appears to be that he can embrace the economic reality, whereas the polls might suggest Harris might be better off — at least for now — ignoring the plight of Americans suffering through the Biden-Harris economy. For the convention, the betting appeared to be that she can skip past it, banking on enough loyal Democrats and enough independents to get her across the finish line.
It’s a gamble, but Harris won’t think incomes not keeping up with inflation matters until the polls tell her campaign it does, but by then, it might already be too late. Stay tuned
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August 27, 2024
Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard endorses Donald Trump
I always thought she was too realistic to be a Donk
Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard has given Donald Trump a ringing endorsement for his White House bid, blasting her erstwhile political foe Kamala Harris in a speech in Detroit, days after party scion Robert F Kennedy Jr similarly backed the former president.
Ms Gabbard, who served as a Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii for eight years to 2021, praised Mr Trump, 78, for his foreign policy as president, including his courage to “meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners in the pursuit of peace”.
Speaking at a National Guard conference alongside Mr Trump, who is seeking to regain political momentum as Vice-President Ms Harris inches ahead in the polls, Ms Gabbard urged Americans to “stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power”, referring to Democrats’ alleged weaponisation of the courts to prosecute the former president.
“We can’t allow our country to be destroyed by politicians who will put their own power ahead of the interests of the American people, our freedom and our future,” she said in a speech to mark the three-year anniversary of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 American service members were killed in a bomb blast at Kabul airport. “Kamala Harris has done this over the last 3½ years; she won’t hesitate to continue that if she is elected.”
Ms Gabbard, who along with Ms Harris unsuccessfully sought the Democrat nomination for president in 2020, has become a regular fixture on conservative media since she left the party in 2022, slamming it then as an “elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness”.
“I am proud to stand here before you today, whether Democrats or Republican or independent, if you love our country as I do, if you cherish peace and freedom as we do, I invite you to join me in doing all we can to save our country and elect Trump and send him back to the White House,” she told the audience to rounds of applause.
Ms Gabbard, who was considered an outside chance to become Mr Trump’s vice-presidential running mate before he chose Senator JD Vance, has become an outspoken critic of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, citing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine she argues are in part provoked and sustained by the US.
“This admin has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and brought us closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before … I am confident (Mr Trump’s) first task will be to walk us back from the brink of war,” she said in her remarks.
Mr Trump has enlisted Ms Gabbard, 43, to help him prepare ahead of his scheduled first and possibly only debate with Ms Harris, planned to take place September 10. “He knows the issues. He is very homed in on her record in reminding voters … ‘what have you done for the last 3½ years?’ ” she told Fox last week when asked how Mr Trump’s preparation was going.
In an exchange that went viral in 2019, Ms Gabbard tore into Ms Harris during a Democrat primary debate, arguably derailing the then California senator’s first presidential bid, who like her later dropped out of the race without winning a single delegate. “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Ms Gabbard said.
Ms Gabbard’s endorsement came as Mr Trump ramps up his campaign appearances including in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week. Ms Harris and her running mate Tim Walz will launch a bus tour of South Georgia later this week, seeking to extend a political honeymoon during which the 59-year-old has secured a polling lead over Mr Trump since she replaced Joe Biden as Democrat presidential candidate.
With the two major parties’ nominating conventions finished, Ms Harris, who has yet to agree to a press conference or interview since becoming the nominee last month, is leading in the polls by 47 per cent to 43 per cent, according to the latest average by FiveThirtyEight.
Mr Kennedy, a member of America’s storied political clan, suspended his long-shot presidential bid as on Friday and endorsed Mr Trump, injecting new uncertainty into the White House race. The 70-year-old failed to get on the ballot in even half of the 50 US states and his independent candidacy featured a number of twists – including his claim to be suffering from a parasitic brain worm.
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Trump would veto national abortion ban says Vance
Smart move
Donald Trump would veto a national abortion ban, his running-mate, JD Vance, said as their White House campaign tried to regain the initiative after the Democratic convention.
Vance also sought to turn the focus of the election back on to higher food and housing prices as Trump’s pollsters warned of a bounce in the polls for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president.
Democrats made clear at their convention in Chicago that reproductive rights were a cornerstone of their appeal to voters in November’s election after conservative judges on the US Supreme Court, including three appointed by Trump, overturned the federal right of access.
Vance, 40, told NBC’s Meet The Press that Trump, who has spoken of his pride in enabling the abortion ruling, “wants to end this culture war over this particular topic”.
“If California wants to have a different abortion policy from Ohio, then Ohio has to respect California, and California has to respect Ohio,” Vance said.
“Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a non-stop federal conflict over this issue. The federal government ought to be focused on getting food prices down, getting housing prices down – issues, of course, where Kamala Harris has been a total disaster.”
Abortion is banned in 14 of the country’s 50 states, with some exceptions to save the life of the woman or in cases of rape or incest, with bans at various early stages of pregnancy up to 18 weeks in eight more states.
Pressed on whether Trump would veto a bill for a federal abortion ban across America, Vance said: “If you’re not supporting it as the president of the US, you fundamentally have to veto it.”
Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, told NBC: “American women are not stupid and we are not going to trust the future of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country.”
The Harris campaign said it had raised dollars 540 million in donations following President Biden’s withdrawal on July 21, a huge sum that dwarfed Trump’s fundraising efforts in July of dollars 138.7 million.
Trump will try to get back on the front foot with speeches in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin this week while Harris and her running-mate, Tim Walz, will kick off their own tour in Georgia on Wednesday.
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August 26, 2024
To get ahead of the curve, the Fed should follow the quantity theory of money
I would have thought that it was bleeding obvious that monetary expansion would be followed by price inflation but I accept that they are talking below about the short to medium term whereas the effects of monetary expansion on prices certainly can take some time to emerge
The tide has suddenly turned on the economics consensus among everyone from Keynesian professors to Wall Street commentators. Their expectations for a soft landing have fallen to earth.
The immediate trigger for the shift and the selloff in equity markets was a run of adverse data last week. It began on Wednesday, with higher claims for unemployment insurance, followed on Thursday by weak purchasing-manager indexes for manufacturing and services. Then on Friday came disappointing nonfarm payroll data and a higher than expected unemployment figure.
To explain why the consensus changed so fast, the economic chattering classes and press have latched onto the Sahm rule. That tool, created by economist Claudia Sahm, correlates an increase in unemployment with the onset of recessions. According to Ms. Sahm’s research, if the unemployment rate climbs by half a percentage point or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months, we will be in the early months of a recession.
This index has identified all recessions since 1953, but Ms. Sahm rightly emphasizes that the rule is only an empirical regularity, not a theory. Since January the unemployment rate has risen from 3.7% to 4.3%, fulfilling the Sahm criterion of a 0.5-point rise. The 3.7% low qualified, as it represents a low that has occurred within the past 12 months. This suggests the economy may already be in a recession.
The Federal Reserve was having none of it last week. On Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee held the federal-funds rate steady at 5.25% to 5.5%. Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues are data dependent. Until the data give them confidence that inflation will stay low, or until their full employment objective is threatened, they won’t cut rates. Since we know that changes in monetary policy act with a long lag in affecting inflation or unemployment, a data-dependent Fed will always be behind the curve.
To get ahead of it, the central bank should be basing its decisions on the quantity theory of money, a model that allows for reliable predictions about the course of the economy and inflation over the coming two years. The only people who successfully predicted inflation almost two years ahead of its peak—both in terms of timing and magnitude—were monetary economists.
For more than a year, monetarists have been warning that the economy would likely enter recession this year. That is because the Fed has over-constricted money growth between 2022 and 2024. The stock of money is now lower than it was in July 2022. Since the Fed was established in 1913, such contractions have only occurred on four occasions: in 1920-22, 1929-33, 1937-38 and 1948-49. The second episode resulted in the Great Depression, and recessions followed the other three.
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Trumpenomics: The implications of a second Trump term
David Pearl
As we know, Trump has a powerful – and seemingly debilitating – psychological effect on the great majority of commentators. Very few seem capable of detached, balanced and nuanced analysis.
Many of my fellow economists, the vast majority of whom are politically to the left of centre, have fallen over themselves to denounce Trump’s economics. In June, sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, issued an open letter arguing that Joe Biden’s economic agenda (which no doubt will be replicated by Kamala Harris, if elected) was ‘vastly superior’ to Donald Trump’s.
A second Donald Trump presidency, they asserted, risked ‘reigniting’ inflation given his commitment to raise tariffs and cut taxes, conveniently ignoring the alarming surge in inflation on Biden’s watch. Bizarrely, the laureates suggested that Biden has lowered ‘long-run inflationary pressures’ by subsidising wind and solar energy, which as we know is a proven strategy for raising, rather than cutting, power prices.
Australian economists have been no better, predicting variously that Trump will destroy the international trading system, take control of the Federal Reserve and even, according to one, refuse to leave office once his term is up. (The idea of Trump assuming direct responsibility for monetary policy – and therefore interest rates and inflation – is ridiculous. He may be a lot of things, but he is not stupid).
While the outlines of Trump’s likely agenda are well known, his plans for trade and illegal immigration have received almost all the attention.
Economists have seized on his intention to impose an across-the-board 10-per-cent tariff on US imports, and tariffs of up to 60 per cent on goods from China. While this is understandable, they have typically ignored the bigger policy picture.
Trump is a committed tax reformer, and will want to extend his 2017 personal income tax cuts due to expire in 2025 (these narrowed deductions and lowered rates across most brackets, with the top rate set at 37 per cent). He is likely to call for a further reduction in the corporate tax rate.
And if elected, Trump will comprehensively deregulate the US energy sector, including: removing regulatory restrictions on oil production, natural gas, nuclear power and clean coal; scrapping car emission and electric vehicle mandates; and, once again, pulling the US out of the Paris climate change accord.
How should we characterise Trump’s economic philosophy? His critics have usually described it as populist and protectionist. Sympathisers have characterised it as nationalist-conservative, suggesting Trump favours a big and intrusive government, but dedicated to right-wing instead of progressive causes. In truth, none of these labels fits the bill, or at least not entirely.
While I agree that Trump is no classical free trader, his support for lower taxes and energy deregulation is firmly in the Reagan tradition. True, Reagan deregulated the US finance sector, not energy (although, he famously removed the solar panels his Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof), but there are parallels between these agendas.
In the 1980s, the economic costs of financial regulations (many dating back to the Depression era) became crushing for the US and other Western economies, raising the cost of capital, misallocating resources on a vast scale and limiting growth. Today, it is the extensive network of energy regulations, designed to force cheap and reliable fossil fuels out of the market, which is doing the most economic harm.
The positive supply-side impacts of Trump’s energy deregulation plans, if realised, are likely to dwarf any negative effect of his tariff agenda. (Remember that for large economies like the US, the costs of protection, while not trivial, are far lower than they are for smaller economies like Australia.)
Fiscal policy provides another parallel between Trump and Reagan. Reagan cut taxes but did not touch entitlement programs, securing the support of millions of working class Democrats.
Trump plans to do the same thing. Before we reach for the smelling salts, we should keep in mind that the US’s international creditors, with China at the forefront, have been only too happy – through their continued purchases of US government bonds – to finance its budget deficits.
Should Australians fear or be optimistic about a second Trump presidency? Leaving aside the simplistic view of his haters, it will be a mixed bag.
While Trump is a protectionist, Kamala Harris is as well (judging by the record of the Biden administration). So there will be broad continuity here. And let’s not panic about Trump’s sabre-rattling on China trade, which in my view is more about positioning him for a bilateral deal than anything else, a two-step strategy he followed during his first term. Back then, of course, Trump exempted Australia from higher steel and aluminium tariffs. Given the weakness of its economy, I have no doubt China will be ready to negotiate.
If trade, under either Trump or Harris, presents some risks, the big policy shift will come in the area of energy. Trump’s plans in this area, if realised, will undermine, perhaps fatally, the global – in truth largely Western – emissions reduction crusade. By delegitimising wind-and-solar ideology, it may free Australia to pursue more rational energy and climate change policies.
This all said, it would be foolish to over-analyse what a second Trump presidency might bring. After all, the Covid pandemic, which arguably cost him the 2020 election, came out of the blue. And with the election still months away and recent polls tightening, Trump is no certainty to take office.
It is intellectually lazy, and an insult to the millions of Americans who will vote for him, to dismiss Trump as a fool or would-be dictator. He is neither.
But nor is he a political messiah. He is flesh and blood, a singular politician to be sure, but a politician nevertheless. His plans on tax and energy, if realised, will deliver enormous gains to the US economy and set a positive policy example for Australia.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/trumpenomics/
*******************************************August 25, 2024
Kamala Harris’s political strategy: vibes in a vacuum
Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention continued the convention’s vibe. It focused mainly on the usual autobiographical sentimentality. My mother… our neighbourhood… and all the heart tuggung emotion of every American political speech. Whose upbringing is not worthy of a sentimental treatment? It’ a good thing that Australia doesn’t have that stylistic obsession.
There were almost no specifics in the Harris speech, but it certainly, and perhaps unexpectedly, reached the right register of love of country and high aspiration.
It wallowed in abstract nouns and mainly got specific when it denounced Donald Trump.
Nonetheless Harris’s speech had a few unexpected wrinkles. First of all, like the whole convention, it was overtly patriotic.
The Republicans have effectively pushed Democrats into a much more explicit embrace of America, its history and ideals, a more muted critique of the ills of American history and society.
There were American flags everywhere. The crowd broke into chants of “USA! USA! USA!”.
That’s cute and quite smart by Democrats, stealing a characteristically Republican chant.
Also, she showcased the new Democrat way of dealing with Trump, to present him in part as a bit of a joke.
“Donald Trump is in many ways an unserious man,” Harris said.
“But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious.”
That’s a cleverer combination than Democrats have had in the past. The whole convention focused a lot on the alleged dangers of Trump, but in a less hysterical tone.
Indeed, one of the features of the convention was a series of anti-Trump Republican speakers. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinziger was especially effective.
The best part of Harris’s speech were a few strong paragraphs on foreign policy. Unexpectedly perhaps, she strongly backed Israel and its right to defend itself but also reasonably labelled what’s happened in Gaza as devastating.
She also said she’d always provide for a powerful US military, “the strongest and most lethal force in the world”, which runs against her quite recent advocacy for cutting defence spending.
She pledged support for Ukraine and criticised Trump for endangering NATO. That was orthodox presidential stuff but she’s never done it before.
Harris hardly mentioned Biden and tried to recapture some of the campaign magic of Barack Obama.
She still offered almost nothing specific on the US economy.
It was still almost entirely about the vibe. A few sentences of substance were welcome but all the more stark because they were so lonely.
Harris thinks she’s going to become president in November. The candidate who couldn’t win a single vote when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, who five minutes ago had a lower approval rating than the departing Joe Biden, whose manifest lack of experience and competence was one reason Biden selected her as an unthreatening deputy, thinks she will sweep the board and, to mix the metaphors, surf into the White House on a wave of joy and love and happiness and IVF and abortion.
At least, that’s the message from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
It was a brilliantly produced and nearly flawlessly executed affair, a Hollywood winner, all the more effective because it shifted towards the new fashions in the genre.
All the stars performed. Barack Obama, certainly the most effective political speaker of his generation, and Michelle Obama, licensed to be the angry Democrat. Bill Clinton, fading a little but still with lots of magic. Hillary Clinton, not quite right as ever. And the newly discovered governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, presenting as the folksy goodie nice guy dad, football coach, high school teacher, aw shucks, just the sweetest guy in the room. Biden, like a garrulous grandpa, on the first night talking and talking and talking endlessly, endlessly, endlessly with his old anecdotes and political war stories, until way after midnight, way after not only his bedtime but everybody else’s as well, then sent away from the party, never to be seen again.
And the biggest star of all – Oprah Winfrey! She’s still got it. She was Barack Obama’s most important endorsement in 2008. Some studies say she got him a million votes. She didn’t campaign for Hillary, and look what happened. But now she’s back in the ring for Kamala. “Choose common sense over nonsense,” Winfrey says.
And Kamala herself, intermittently present, still yet to give an unscripted interview since Biden, more than a month ago, announced he would not run again, the most perfectly curated candidate since Robert Redford in The Candidate, offering the most inviting blank canvas for every hope to be written on since Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.
Bill Clinton suggested Harris, who worked in a fast food restaurant as a youngster, would eclipse his record as the president who spent the most time at McDonald’s. Surely this other record, the first new frontrunner candidate for the presidency to go longer than a month after announcing her candidacy without giving a single unscripted interview, is the more significant record.
Former President Bill Clinton devoted a great portion of his speech at the Democratic National Convention to mocking Donald Trump, from his self obsession, his age, even his obsession with Hannibal Lecter.
The Democratic National Convention, while mostly civil in tone and joyous in the way the laughter track on an old 1960s sitcom is joyous, also demonstrated the new hollowness, the intellectual bankruptcy, the sheer echoing emptiness of modern presidential politics, which has become a kind of universal celebrity dancing-with-the-stars performance. There was almost no mention of policy of any kind, barely a line about foreign policy, certainly nothing so otiose as defence policy, until a couple of sentences in Harris’s own convention speech. Similarly, there was nothing about cyber security, budget deficits or any of that boring old yesterday’s stuff, the looking at the past kind of old politics.
Instead, everything was about the vibe, a perfectly conceived series of empty, and often quite dishonest, emotional high points.
There was less Hollywood than in previous Democrat conventions. The politicians still wanted a bit of entertainment glamour, but mostly they mined their own backstories for ersatz glamour. Pete Buttigieg, the Transport Secretary, an impressive performer in anyone’s books, nonetheless said absolutely nothing about transport and spoke instead almost exclusively about his gay marriage.
The first night was all about feminist women celebrating the wonderful identity politics of Harris’s candidacy. To be clear, any background can furnish a good presidential candidate. Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice would have been superb Republican candidates. But do you really vote for someone because of their ethnicity or sex?
Michelle Obama put the biggest stress on black identity politics.
“For years,” she said, “Donald Trump did everything he could to make people fear us. Who is going to tell him the job he is seeking might be one of those black jobs?”
Her reference was to Trump saying that illegal immigrants were taking black and Hispanic jobs. This was a clumsy, even ugly, formulation by Trump, for sure. But his meaning was harmless. Illegal immigrants were taking jobs that African-Americans and Hispanics traditionally occupied in very large numbers. But Michelle Obama labelling the presidency “a black job”, is that really an example of “when they go low, we go high”?
Similarly, there was the first night’s highlight, Hillary Clinton – we put some cracks in that glass ceiling but on the other side of those cracks is Kamala Harris being inaugurated as president!
The Democrats dialled back identity politics a bit, but it’s still central to their pitch.
As well as dialling down identity politics and Hollywood, the Democrats, in a measured and limited way, dialled up God and patriotism.
Everybody seemed to finish their speech with God bless America, which for some years had gone right out of fashion among Democrats. Lots of folks talked about the help of God and going to church. There were several one-line denunciations of anti-Semitism, and only a few of them were accompanied by the formerly obligatory simultaneous denunciation of Islamophobia.
One or two speakers said they wanted the war in Gaza to end as soon as possible, an idea so wonderfully generic that anybody from any party in America could sign up to it.
You could just about see the team of Democrat script writers calibrating everything. There was even just the right amount of anti-Israel demonstrators outside the convention. The presence of left-wing demonstrators helps reassure middle America that the Democrats are not themselves left-wing extremists, but the fact the number of demonstrators is not too big means they won’t generate any real energy against the Democratic ticket on the left.
This was nothing like 1968, when the US commitment to the Vietnam war ripped Democrats apart and there were passionate debates on the convention floor. Nothing happens now at conventions that is not perfectly scripted. As a result conventions are much less meaningful as democratic exercises. The political parties like it like that. No political professional wants an outbreak of real democracy. The DNC was every bit as contrived and artificial as the Republican National Convention a few weeks earlier. Both parties create a kind of fantasy America in which the other side is a mortal threat to democracy and only their party can come to the rescue.
Image is everything. Memes are bankable currency. Democrat congressional leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered a speech that seemed staccato and a bit demented until you realised it was a rap performance designed to go viral, or at least to be a little contagious.
Speaker after speaker labelled Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and Republicans generally as “weird”, but this too was carefully calibrated. Mostly each speaker, even the big beast former presidents Obama and Clinton, used the word only once, lest the mere repetition of the word weird should start to look weird itself.
Of course, “weird” is a pretty mild insult. Trump himself has been so brutishly and coarsely insulting, indeed childishly insulting, about anyone he doesn’t like at any given moment, and has himself so often said things that are completely untrue, that he has no claims to sympathy over having his honour or reputation trashed.
Nonetheless, it’s important to see when the Democrats are telling the truth, and when they’re telling lies. The Democrat convention trafficked in untruth at three levels.
First, it offered no policies, while claiming to be providing a choice between good government and weirdness. But American politics is now entirely dominated by the dynamics of celebrity. Policy is the last thing anyone talks about.
Second, it pretended the Biden-Harris record simply didn’t exist, or that Harris had no part in its many manifold failures.
Before the convention, Harris outlined some bare scraps of an economic policy. Inflation was too high, she proclaimed, and she would tackle it. Inflation was high, in her view, because of corporate greed and “price gouging”.
In fact, inflation has risen because of the massive increase in government spending that Biden, with Harris as his Vice-President, has driven. Not only that, prices paid by producers have risen as quickly as prices paid by consumers, which means price gouging is the least of all the problems.
The few concrete policies Harris has proposed, such as government-imposed price caps and government-imposed rent increase caps, would be disastrous and have support from virtually no serious economist. Similarly, Harris has said she’ll tackle illegal immigration. Yet the crisis on the Mexican border was entirely created by Biden and Harris.
Third, and perhaps most seriously, the Democrat convention consistently lied about Trump and the Republicans. I don’t mean here shades of grey or exaggerations but just plain outright lies. Almost every third speech, it seemed, mentioned the threat of Republicans not only to absolute legal abortion from conception to birth but also to IVF fertility treatments.
I found this intriguing because I wasn’t aware of any Republican proposal to restrict IVF. It turns out there is no such proposal. Some anti-abortion activists are opposed to IVF because it involves creating and disposing of embryos. No Republican politician is remotely opposed to IVF, certainly not Trump or Vance. There was a court case in Alabama that threw some doubt on IVF’s legality and the state Republicans immediately rushed to make sure it remained legal. Trump and Vance support it, as do more or less all Republicans.
The lie that Republicans plan to ban IVF is so brazen that when you hear it consistently over several days your first reaction is to assume there must be some serious proposal among Republicans to at least restrict IVF. In fact there is none.
Senate Democrats introduced a declaratory bill mandating a national right to IVF, and a similar bill on contraception. Republicans all said they supported IVF but leave the matter to the states, none of which inhibits IVF. So this pure stunt is then used as a justification for a wholly fraudulent claim that Republicans actively plan to outlaw IVF. No wonder so many Americans hate politics.
More here:
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August 22, 2024
Have I "radicalised"?
Matt Goodwin describes well below the way a half-mad Leftist elite have taken control of the national discourse in Britain -- to a point where policies and procedures very harmful to the average Briton have been put in place.
A major omisssion from what Matt says below, however, is that he fails to take account of the fact that it is only one half of the elite that is Leftist. At election time, at least half of people in elite occupations vote conservative. As ever, it is minorities and the poor who are the support-base of the Left, not the elite as a whole.
So the deeper question about elite influence is how the LEFTIST elite have gained so much power in the media, in the educational system and to some extent in big business?
An answer is complacency. The destructive Leftist policies all have justifications as being kind and caring. And those who are in a position to see the full picture tend to think that the polices sound good so may well spring from real good intentions and should therefore not be opposed. So we badly need writers such as Matt to alert us to how much damage is being done by the ideas of the Leftist elite
“What happened to you, Matt? When did you change your views? When did you become right-wing? When did you become … radical?”
These are questions I’m asked a lot, usually by disgruntled members of the elite class —an assortment of left-wing academics, journalists, and think-tankers I worked with more than a decade ago.
And while this is deliberate, a concerted strategy to try and discredit anybody who challenges the elite consensus, these questions do need answering for two reasons.
First, because I feel an enormous sense of responsibility and obligation to be as truthful as possible to you, my readers and supporters.
And, second, because as one of my favourite writers, Andrew Sullivan, once wrote, this dynamic should really be the other way round.
It’s not me who has radicalised. It’s the elite class.
Today, we are simply living through the greatest radicalisation of the ruling class in Western democracies since at least the 1960s, if not for more than a century.
What do I mean by this?
Well, let’s start with my own views.
I’ve certainly made no secret of the fact that, over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve become more critical of things like mass, uncontrolled immigration.
Why? Because research shows it creates low-trust societies that are more divided, polarised, segregated, less supportive of welfare, and more violent.
I was recently in Sweden, for example, where I did not meet anybody on the left or right who felt their country’s experiment with mass immigration has been a success.
Let me say that again.
I was in Sweden —notoriously liberal, tolerant Sweden— and I could not find a single soul who thought that mass immigration had made their country a nice place to live.
I’ve also become more critical not of multi-ethnic societies per se but rather the state policy of multiculturalism, which encourages different ethnic and religious groups to live separate ‘parallel lives’, rather than integrate into a wider, shared community.
And I’m not alone in this.
More than a decade ago, leaders from across the spectrum —David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair— could all say much the same, and in public.
What else do I think?
I reject anti-Muslim prejudice much like I reject anti-Semitism and racism.
But I do have strong and growing concerns about the capacity and willingness of Islam to integrate into West nations, to respect our rule of law, the rights of women and same-sex couples, and to root out violent Islamism among its ranks.
My critics on the left, who have spent much of the last decade inflating terms like “Islamophobia”, will say this is irrational.
But I would say it’s entirely rational after watching violent Islamists blow up 52 of their fellow citizens on London’s Tube and buses, murder British children at a pop concert, execute British soldier Lee Rigby, police officer Keith Palmer, and Member of Parliament Sir David Amess, attempt to blow up a women’s hospital in Liverpool, and stab and murder dozens of other innocents, like pensioner Terence Carney.
Not to mention my confusion about why so few prominent British Muslims, Imams, and others, for years, failed to call out the industrial-scale rape of young white girls at the hands of Pakistani Muslim gangs in dozens of English cities, and when a few brave souls did call this out much of the left said nothing or dismissed them as ‘racist’.
I also believe passionately in free speech but now worry it’s being undermined by a creeping groupthink, political correctness, and cancel culture —a point The Economist, among many others, has also made in recent years.
I think we’re too soft on criminals and would like to see tougher sentencing, especially for repeat offenders who make the lives of their fellow residents and communities miserable and intolerable because we no longer put them where they belong: prison.
I believe that the family, shaped by my own experience of having been raised by divorced parents, is the most important unit in society, that children who are raised by two parents routinely do better in life than those who are not.
I believe that the nation-state is an incredibly powerful source of belonging, pride, and status for most people, that Western nations got more things right than wrong in their history, and that public institutions, especially schools and universities, should ensure this remarkable cultural inheritance is passed down to our children.
And when it comes to economics, I think capitalism is the most successful economic system we’ve managed to create but also think that global corporations, big business and crony capitalists routinely look for ways to exploit workers.
Like many other members of my generation, Gen-X, I came of age during the 1990s and the 2000s, watching globalisation disproportionately damage the working-class in Western economies and then lived through the Global Financial Crash, with few of those responsible for ruining economies and people’s lives facing any consequences.
These views are not extreme. Nor are they particularly radical.
They basically put me where the average voter is. Across the West, all these views are shared by millions, and usually majorities, of ordinary people.
But now look at the elite class.
Look at the university graduates from the elite institutions, who work in financially secure if not well-paid professional jobs, who live in one of the big cities, the affluent commuter suburbs, and the university towns, whose parents also belong to this class, whose marriages and social networks are likewise filled with people from this class, who share the same backgrounds, values, and political loyalties, and who all lean strongly to the political and cultural left.
They’ve radicalised.
Over the last fifteen years, they’ve swung even more sharply to the left, leaving a large number of people scratching their heads, asking themselves the same question.
What the hell happened to the ruling class, to the people who dominate the most important and influential institutions in my country, who claim to speak on my behalf?
Writing on his deathbed in the early 1990s, the academic Christopher Lasch once said that the revolt that was about to commence in the West would not see the masses revolting against elites but elites revolting against the masses.
And he was right; this is exactly what is now happening around us.
Increasingly, our societies are being radically reshaped around the values, beliefs, tastes, and priorities of a radicalising minority elite, rather than the wider majority.
Just look at where the elite class is today compared to where it was, say, ten or fifteen years ago, and compared to where many ordinary people, like me, still are today.
While large majorities of people in the West, like me, think mass, uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable and damaging Western economies, culture, and ways of life, today’s elite class, as we saw in its reaction to things like Europe’s refugee crisis, Brexit, Trump, and the recent immigration protests in the UK, has now radicalised to such an extent that it views any criticism of this policy, any criticism at all, as tantamount to ‘racism’ and ‘hate’.
Whereas only a few years ago, the likes of Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Blair could talk openly about the failure of state multiculturalism, triggering a useful debate, today’s elite class, including even Conservatives, could not even handle the likes of Suella Braverman making the very same point without having a complete nervous breakdown and catastrophising about the possible return of fascism.
Similarly, whereas in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities on 9/11 and 7/7 we could just about have a reasonable debate about how best to integrate newcomers, prevent Islamist terror, and encourage ‘community cohesion’, however flawed those ideas were, today, after things like the murder of children at an Ariana Grande pop concert and the murder of Sir David Amess, the elite class has a total meltdown and insists that we either hold hands and sing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ or have a completely irrelevant debate about ‘online safety’ and how to ‘be nice’ on social media.
Compare and contrast, too, the reaction to urban disturbances in England’s northern towns, in 2001, with the reaction to the immigration protests this year. Whereas only twenty years ago, the elite class was capable of talking openly about the underlying cause, the fact minority (mainly Muslim) communities were living ‘parallel lives’, and that our model of multiculturalism was very clearly failing, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it is incapable to talking about the cause at all.
So far, weeks on from the rioting and protests, for example, the elite class has still said nothing at all about the root cause of the immigration protests, preferring instead to view them simply and narrowly through the prism of criminality while deriding much of the rest of the country as ‘far-right thugs’ and desperately searching for new ways to curtail free speech and shut down any debate. Today’s elite class, in other words, has radicalised to such an extent it is now completely incapable of even leading a national debate that might give voice to views which challenge the elite consensus.
While many people in the West, meanwhile, like me, used to think that a level of net migration of 150,000 a year was too high —a view, by the way, shared by much of the elite class as recently as fifteen years ago— today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that whether on the right or left it now has no problem at all with pushing this number to an eye-watering 700,000 a year while continuously breaking manifesto promises to lower the overall number. The elite class, in short, has morphed from accepting it made mistakes on this issue to now just lying to the British people.
In the 2000s, New Labour politicians could talk openly and honestly about the urgent need to regain control of the borders and swiftly remove illegal migrants from the country; but today, in sharp contrast, the elite class is falling over itself to grant amnesty to nearly 100,000 illegal migrants while branding anybody who talks about ‘stopping the boats’ as ‘far-right’ and blaming them for the outbreak of rioting.
I mean, seriously, am I supposed to be the person who has radicalised here?
While many people in the West, like me, think free speech should be protected and promoted, today’s elite class, as we see through the spread of a chilling cancel culture, an oppressive political correctness, and online mobbings of anybody who dissents on social media, is routinely willing to sacrifice free speech on the altar of ‘social justice’ and protecting minorities from what it calls ‘emotional harm’. Routinely, major surveys now find that the left-leaning elites who dominate universities and other public institutions are the most willing of all to say they’d compromise on free speech and free expression if it means greater protection for minority groups, which helps to explain why they are so eager to shut down voices like mine.
While many people in the West, like me, still think Western liberal societies should be organised around individual rights, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that it actively subordinates individual rights behind people’s fixed group identities. The only thing that really matters to today’s elite class, which is now falling over itself to impose ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ policies on pretty much every institution and government department, is not our individual achievements and character but merely what fixed identity group we belong to. Do we belong to one of the morally superior ‘oppressed’ racial, sexual, or gender minority groups? Or do we belong to the morally inferior ‘oppressor’ majority group, which should be treated with suspicion, if not contempt? Everything, increasingly, flows from these questions.
Even worse, while many people, like me, believe that a child’s early years should be about joy, play, and a politically neutral education, today’s elite class now appears absolutely determined to sexualise and racialise our children, exposing them to radical ideologies that have no serious basis in science and then complaining about the rise of ‘culture wars’ when mums and dads ask entirely legitimate questions about why their child is being taught there are 72 genders, divided into separate ‘racial affinity’ groups in class, or to hate their country, its history, and culture.
While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of debating in good faith and ensuring there is a diverse range of opinions in the institutions and national debate, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it can no longer tolerate any dissent at all, which again you see in the authoritarian reaction to people like me. Consistently, the elite class has launched an assault on contrarian thinkers, demanded that alternative television channels like GB News, and social media platforms like Twitter/X be shut down, failed to stop unorthodox gender critical and conservative scholars from being kicked out of universities, and is now increasingly using ‘hate laws’, ‘non-hate crime incidents’ and opposition to ‘legal but harmful’ views to essentially shut down alternative perspectives it does not like.
What happened to me, you ask? No. What the hell happened to you.
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While many people in the West, like me, think we should treat people from different racial, ethnic, and religious groups equally before the law, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that, as we’ve seen in its reaction to the immigration protests, the marches after the hideous attacks on Israel on October 7th attack, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the ongoing failure to address ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, it’s now more than happy to treat minorities more favourably than the majority, or simply remain silent when some people from minority backgrounds flagrantly violate our children, laws, and ways of life.
While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the superiority of Western civilisation and Enlightenment values, and on balance think the West got more right than wrong in its history, today’s elite class, which is supposed to value nuance, evidence, and reason, has now become utterly obsessed with feeding its own sense of moral righteousness and narcissism by trying to convince us that everything from our history to science, from cricket to the countryside, are mere manifestations of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘structural racism’. Increasingly, they hate who we are to try and win more social status, esteem, and prestige for themselves, from other elites.
While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of a politically independent and ideologically diverse media that prioritises truth, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that once respected legacy media like the BBC, the New York Times, and Financial Times, have morphed into platforms for hyper-political activists who prioritise ideological dogma over truth and reason.
And in the universities, too, I spent much of the last decade watching things like the Grievance Studies Affair and the shocking harassment and sacking of scholars who challenge the consensus, like Kathleen Stock and Roland Fryer, all of which made it obvious that the academy is now openly corrupt, highly politicised, and much more interested in prioritising left-wing dogma over evidence and reason —shocking cases, by the way, about which my critics said … absolutely nothing at all.
While many people in the West, like me, think we should be led by the kind of evidence and logic that underpinned the UK’s Cass Review into what was happening to children in hospitals, which pointed out there was insufficient evidence to be pushing children onto things like ‘puberty blockers’, the elite class today has become so radical that it’s no longer interested in evidence that challenges its worldview at all. Routinely, as we still see in healthcare and education, the so-called ‘expert class’ still put emotional blackmail, superstition, and dogma before empirical evidence, even when it involves the medical treatment (read: mutilation) of our children.
While many people in the West, like me, certainly think voters can be misled but ultimately see them as rational beings capable of making up their own minds, today’s elite class now trace any political outcome it doesn’t like, whether at elections or referendums, to “misinformation”, all while trying to tell us with a straight face that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that things like Brexit and Trump were caused by Russia. Who is spreading “misinformation” here?
And while many people in the West, like me, think that people voting for things we don’t like is a bit annoying but perfectly acceptable in a democracy, today’s elite class, as we’ve seen in its reaction to things like Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson, and fourteen years of pro-immigration liberal Tory government, has radicalised to such a degree that it now genuinely appears to believe it is living amid a fascist uprising, that the West is on the cusp of morphing into something that resembles the Third Reich.
In some other galaxy, where the elite class is just a fringe group of oddball people who have no influence over society, these views might not matter. But because the elite class dominate the most important and influential institutions, it’s used its immense social and cultural power to impose this narrow, illiberal and radical worldview on the rest of us —on ‘meaning making’ institutions like schools, universities, government departments, healthcare systems, legacy media, and creative and cultural industries.
This is deeply problematic because while the elite class likes to think of itself as representing the beating heart of the nation, the blunt reality, as major surveys show, is that most of its views are only held by a maximum of 10-15% of people in the West.
This is why, today, a much larger number of people are looking at the radicalisation of the elite class with a combination of bemusement, shock, and, increasingly, horror, wondering what the hell happened to the people who are ruling over them, claiming to speak on their behalf.
While my critics certainly don’t like it, the blunt reality is that many of these ordinary people are much closer to my views than the radicalising views of the elite class, and yet writers like me who challenge if not oppose the elite consensus are now framed as radical outliers. But as Andrew Sullivan said, this is the wrong way round. It is the elite class that is now the radical outlier.
The real story here, the story my critics routinely ignore or get wrong, is actually not about me at all. It is about the radicalisation of the elite class, a minority radical elite that is imposing its values on the rest of society while simultaneously expecting ordinary people not to notice and certainly not dare say anything about it.
Mass uncontrolled immigration. Broken borders. Segregation. The rise of violent Islamism. A stifling political correctness. Woke ideology. The dismissal of biology, empirical evidence, and scientific fact. The closing down of free speech and the public square. The repudiation of our history, culture, and ways of life. And the general hatred and class prejudice that’s now hurled at millions of ordinary people when they happen to vote for, or say, the wrong thing.
When did I radicalise, you say?
You must be joking. When the hell did YOU radicalise.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/have-i-radicalised
*******************************************August 20, 2024
Kamala Harris’ $25,000 first-time homebuyer subsidy and 3 million new homes with building tax credits will fuel housing inflation—just like the housing bubble
By Robert Romano
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has unveiled a new scheme to facilitate home building and home purchases with hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies, including a $25,000 first-time homebuyer subsidy, said by the campaign to cost $100 billion to facilitate 1 million first-time home purchases a year over the next four years.
Additionally, Harris wants to expand homebuilder tax credits to facilitate construction of an additional 3 million new units over that time.
Similar incentives are already used by Congress via the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Treasury to facilitate home and apartment construction and renovation, including $3.3 billion of community development block grants, but what Harris is proposing is much larger.
In the 2000s, underwriting standards were reduced to facilitate an expansion of mortgage loans to homebuyers. a massive injection of credit as mortgage debt nearly doubled from $4.9 trillion in 2003 to $9.29 trillion by the end of 2008, according to the New York Federal Reserve data, as home prices jumped a gargantuan 40 percent according to the Freddie Mac Home Price Index. The number of mortgage holders had skyrocketed from 80 million in 2003 to 98 million in 2008. From 2003 to 2007, more than 9 million new privately owned units were put onto the market.
Afterward the financial crisis — which was created by overproducing homes leading to prices to eventually collapse (by more than 26 percent by 2011) and the last homebuyers in the bubble to be left with negative equity that many chose to be foreclosed upon rather than pay because they couldn’t afford to sell — mortgages settled back down to about 80 million mortgages with about $8 trillion of mortgage debt by 2013. Homebuilding also slowed down, with only 4.3 million new homes constructed.
There it remained relatively stable at about 80 million mortgages, but home prices once again appreciated from their bottom in 2011 by about 38.8 percent through the end of 2016, with still 80 million mortgages with mortgage debt reaching $8.5 trillion. And the pace of homebuilding picked up again, totaling 3.3 million from 2014 through 2016.
Further, from 2017 to Jan. 2021, home prices again appreciated another 32 percent, the number of mortgages reached 81 million and mortgage debt increased to $10 trillion. From 2017 to 2021, another 5.1 million new homes were constructed.
Finally, since Jan. 2021, home prices continued accelerating, up another 32.3 percent as the number of mortgages has jumped to 85 million and mortgage debt is now up to a whopping $12.5 trillion as another 6.4 million new homes were constructed, although, new private owned homes built has been dropping each of the past 3 years from its 2021 peak of 1.6 million to 1.4 million in 2023 and averaging 1.35 million in 2024 so far. Usually, home construction slows down leading into recessions, which Harris is desperately hoping to avoid until at least after the election in November.
But now, prices have gotten so high, thanks in no small part to the $7 trillion printed, borrowed and spent into existence during and after Covid, that the rate of existing home sales are plummeting, just like they did in the 2000s. In Jan. 2021, existing home sales were at a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 6.69 million units sold. Whereas, by June 2024, it is all the way down to an annualized 3.89 million units sold, as 41.8 percent decrease.
So, home building is up, but now home buying is down but there’s still a lot more mortgages. That means there is no supply shortage.
The reason is not because of a lack of subsidies, it is because personal incomes have in no way kept up with the rising costs of housing, only up 18.2 percent compared to home prices’ 32.3 percent. Additionally, 30-year mortgage interest rates have more than doubled since 2020, and with it, monthly mortgage payments on the same unit of housing if purchase now has similarly more than doubled.
It is into that mix that Harris wants to pour in hundreds of billions of dollars of more subsidies for both home building and first-time homebuyer downpayments, essentially a mortgage origination subsidy bringing the number of mortgages to about 90 million and beyond, the highest levels seen since the housing bubble popped, at a time when incomes are not keeping up with inflation.
Here’s a hint. A house that was worth $250,000 in Jan. 2021 is now worth $337,000. Harris wants to give the homebuyer for that existing home a $25,000 subsidy, knocking the principal owed down to $312,000. And they’d be paying about 6.8 percent in interest payments. In 2021, with interest just 2.65 percent, that same unit only cost $1,007 a month when it was worth $250,000.
So, instead of the current $2,192 a month owed for the mortgage payment on that same unit, despite hundreds of billions of subsidies in the Harris scheme, even if the prices of homes magically remained frozen which they won’t, the monthly payment drops to $2,096 a month. Wow.
All that to keep the housing expansion going, as home prices keep appreciating, and as interest rates remain high, postponing a recession that will almost certainly come anyway, only with the potential of home prices collapsing like they did in the 2000s, wiping Harris’ Democratic Party out in the 2026 midterms should she win and likely in 2028 when she hopes to get reelected.
Or we could just eat the recession now, unemployment will go up, yes (it already has by 1.47 million since Dec. 2022), but interest rates will also come down all on their own, thereby reducing monthly mortgage payments, facilitating refinancing and making first-time home purchases more attractive, allowing a more virtuous cycle to ensue. Choose your poison.
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Short reports
Jew-haters converge on DNC in Chicago: “Killer Kamala,” read one sign from an anti-Israel group stationed outside the United Center in Chicago, the site of this week’s Democratic National Convention. “Globalize the intifada,” read another. Clearly, the Democrat Party’s base has its priorities in order. And if, as Marx once said, history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce,” then the authorities who are trying to prevent a repeat of the 1968 DNC have their work cut out for them. “Hundreds of people rallying against the Israel-Hamas war and restrictions on reproductive rights kicked off the first protest of the Democratic National Convention on Sunday,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times, “but they were met by an even larger showing from Chicago police.” Democrat politics make strange bedfellows, though, as embodied in this disjointed quote from one of the belligerents: “Rhetoric does not deliver abortion care from someone in a state that has a six-week abortion ban. What we need is action. We need the end to funding to Israel and the end of delivery of weapons.” Abortion on demand or the eradication of the Jews. Can’t these folks make up their minds?
DNC vasectomies and abortions: Get free vasectomies and abortions just outside the Democratic National Convention today. As The New York Times reports, “This convention is likely to be a head-on display of a new, unbridled abortion politics.” The message is clear: Democrats don’t like children. They are literally celebrating pregnancy prevention and pregnancy elimination. Convention attendants will be greeted by a number of demonstrations, including a giant “inflatable IUD” promoting birth control. Democrats see abortion rights as their leading platform issue, which explains why they are going to extreme and grotesque levels to market it. Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, will focus his convention speech on the campaign’s support for abortion and IVF. As Not the Bee’s Joel Abbott sarcastically observes, “Looks like the Democrats are working hard to prove the nickname ‘Party of Death’ is false!”
Lawmakers launch investigation into Walz over “extensive” ties to Communist China (Daily Wire)
House GOP impeachment inquiry report: House Republicans have released their impeachment inquiry report on Joe Biden, and there’s no question it was timed to coincide with the Democrats kicking off their convention in Chicago. The Republicans launched their investigation last September, and according to the 292-page report, they “have accumulated evidence demonstrating that President Biden has engaged in impeachable conduct.” The report notes that Biden engaged in a “conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family.” Republicans also allege that Biden family members raked in more than $27 million, largely from foreigners, by “leading those interests to believe that such payments would provide them access to and influence with President Biden.” The report details, “As Vice President, President Biden actively participated in his conspiracy by, among other things, attending dinners with his family’s foreign business partners and speaking to them by phone, often when being placed on speakerphone by Hunter Biden.” It adds, “Based on the totality of evidence, it is inconceivable that President Biden did not understand that he was taking part in an effort to enrich his family by abusing his office of public trust.”
Mo Dowd says the quiet part out loud: It was a bloodless coup carried out by the most powerful people in the Not-So-Democratic Party, but the Democrats and their Leftmedia fellow travelers have insisted on trying to portray it as a selfless and heroic choice made by a Rushmore-worthy Joe Biden. Finally, though, someone on the Left has let slip the truth. “The Dems Are Delighted,” reads the headline to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s latest column. “But a Coup Is Still a Coup.” Indeed it is, and Dowd makes no apologies for it. She writes, “Even though it was the right thing to do, because Joe Biden was not going to be able to campaign, much less serve as president for another four years, in a fully vital way, it was a jaw-dropping putsch.” This week’s DNC will ignore all this intrigue in an effort to present a harmonious house, a unified front, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Biden will take the stage tonight to paper over all the bitterness, but it won’t work. He was kicked to the curb by his own party, and everyone knows it.
Undemocratic Michigan Democrats remove Cornel West from ballot: If the Democrats really think Donald Trump is an “existential threat” to “our democracy,” they sure have a funny way of showing it. Not content to have kicked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off the ballot in New York, the party of Kamala Harris has now succeeded in throwing civil rights activist and third-party candidate Cornel West off the ballot in the crucial swing state of Michigan. The reason for this ouster? According to Jonathan Brater, Michigan’s elections director, “The affidavits of identity submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office in June for West and his vice presidential running mate, Melina Abdullah, were not properly notarized.” Let’s be clear: Cornel West wouldn’t have taken a single vote from Trump. But he most definitely would’ve pulled a few disgruntled progressives away from Harris. And in a purplish state like Michigan, those few votes could make all the difference.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/109413-monday-below-the-fold-2024-08-19
*******************************************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/
*******************************************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/
*******************************************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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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/
*******************************************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/
*******************************************August 11, 2024
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.
***********************************************
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.
*******************************************
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/
*******************************************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/
*******************************************6 August, 2024
Brits are finally losing their legendary patience
What Matt Goodwin says below is spot-on but what he leaves unsaid is WHY many Third-world migrants are so toxic to Britain.
They come to Britain hoping to acquire a British standard of living and find that to be beyond their grasp. They just do not have the mental, educational and cultural wherewithall to prosper in Britain and that makes them angry.
They feel angry and ignored and blame Britain for that. Letting them into Britain just makes their difference obvious to them and that hurts. So they strike out at the society that denies them what they had expected and can obviously now never achieve
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”,
So wrote George Orwell in his classic book 1984.
This is the quote that came to mind as I watched Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour government struggle to respond to protests that erupted after three girls were brutally murdered by the son of Rwandan migrants.
But why this quote?
Because that's exactly what Keir Starmer and much of the elite class are now asking us to do —reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.
When Keir Starmer first responded to the protests, he could have made it crystal clear that while there is absolutely no place for violence, his government does understand why so many people are so utterly frustrated and fed-up with the state of Britain.
He could have made the point that while everybody in Britain opposes violence it is clear that many people also hold legitimate concerns about the failure of successive governments to control the borders, lower migration, and maintain law and order.
Had he spoken to protestors, it would have become immediately obvious to Starmer and his team that this was not just about mindless violence or even the tragic events in Southport; it is chiefly about people’s concerns over legal and illegal immigration.
And after clips of marauding Muslim gangs attacking white people went viral, both Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper could also have made it clear that the rule of law will be applied equally, to all groups, irrespective of race and religion.
But they chose not to do that.
Which is why so many people are now even more disillusioned with what they feel is not just a Labour government but an elite class that is deeply biased and out-of-touch with the rest of the country; a class that is more interested in criticising and attacking the British majority than addressing the reasons they feel so utterly disillusioned.
Unlike Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, and much of the ruling class, most normal people in this country know full well that these protests do not begin and end with “far-right thuggery”. Only an elite class that has become dangerously disconnected from the rest of the country would see the protests through this incredibly narrow and warped lens.
These narratives are a coping mechanism for an elite that is visibly struggling to make sense of what is unfolding around it, explanations that help it make sense of these troubling and shocking events but which make little sense to everybody else.
Because for much of the rest of the country, for millions of ordinary British people out there, these events are obviously rooted in the disastrous policies the elite class on both the Left and Right has imposed on Britain for much of the last thirty years.
They are rooted in the deliberate decision to pursue mass immigration, to weaken our borders, to usher in unprecedented cultural changes, to fail to integrate newcomers, and then refuse to tolerate any criticism of these policies.
But they are rooted, too, in a palpable sense of unfairness, hypocrisy, and bias when it comes to this elite class —a class that routinely appears more interested in catering to minorities over the majority, attacking rather than listening to the British majority, and violating the British sense of fair play which is absolutely central to our culture.
Many people today, for example, will have listened to Keir Starmer say “people have a right to feel safe in their country” while asking themselves why his Labour government consistently refuse to prioritise the safety of the British people by controlling who is coming in and out of Britain, deporting foreign criminals, and ensuring criminals remain in prison, not letting thousands onto the streets. Had the elite class stopped the boats and controlled the borders people would not be rioting.
Many people, too, will be wondering why the likes of Keir Starmer, Yvette Cooper, Sadiq Khan, and others routinely talk about “hate” and “thuggery” among the British majority while doing all they can to distract us from asking for the real reasons why our children have been blown up at pop concerts, murdered at dance classes, and subjected to industrial-scale, anti-White rape across dozens of English towns.
Many will also be wondering why the elite class has continued to reshape Britain and its institutions –schools, universities, civil service, museums, galleries, and more—around a corrosive identity politics only to now wonder why the British are organising themselves along similar lines. As even Tommy Robinson has asked, if the lesson of the last few years is that competing identity groups can only gain attention, status, resources, and a voice from the elite class by taking to the streets, as BLM and pro-Hamas supporters did, then why would the white working-class not do the same?
And many people will be wondering if Britain really is the successful multicultural society that the Labour Party and liberals tell us it is then why are we are now watching gangs of Muslims roaming the streets chanting “Allahu Akbar!” rather than waving the Union Jack. Is this what successful multiculturalism looks like?
The elite class does not want us to ask these questions because it cannot answer these questions. To spark this kind of national debate about the policies that have been imposed on the country in recent decades risks threatening the power of this class.
Which is why the elite class is now working overtime to channel us into a much more managed and tightly controlled discussion about things the elite class can control.
They want us to talk about regulating social media. They want us to talk about shutting down alternative views, like those on GB News.
They want us to spend our time demonising counter-cultural writers who have been validated by current events as ‘far right enablers’, ‘apologists’ and ‘grifters’, whose voice should no longer be permitted in a tightly controlled public square.
They want us, in short, to talk about anything and everything except how the policies of the elite class have pushed us to this point —to breaking point.
This is why the narratives promoted by the elite class leave us feeling confused, alienated, and disoriented, unsure if what we think is reality really is reality. And this is why so many people in Britain are quietly asking themselves some questions that reflect this creeping sense of confusion, bewilderment, and unfairness.
Is the elite class calling for clampdowns the same class that cheered on protests by the revolutionary Black Lives Matter, which hates the West and praises Hamas?
Is the elite class that was so quick to talk about the legitimate grievances behind BLM rioting across the West the same class that now refuses to acknowledge this “far-right thuggery” is rooted in wider grievances among the British population?
Is Keir Starmer, the man denouncing these protests as “far-right thuggery”, the same Keir Starmer who rushed to Take the Knee days after Black Lives Matter protestors broke the law, injured nearly 30 police officers and defaced national monuments?
And is he the same Keir Starmer who openly praised Extinction Rebellion and leads a government whose MPs have openly socialised and engaged with Islamist extremists?
Is the elite class that is rushing to denounce the protests the same class that remained largely silent as antisemites and Islamists marched up and down the country celebrating the murder and rape of Jews, or simply denying these things took place?
Are many of the towns that are experiencing the most serious violence today, like Rotherham, the same ones where at least 1,400 young white girls were raped by Muslim gangs, a scandal Labour elites said it was “racist” to talk about?
Are the people causally implying that much of the country is “far right” the same ones who tied themselves in knots over whether they should call Hamas “terrorists”?
Are the police chiefs who deny there is two-tier policing the same ones who watched their officers Take the Knee and join Muslim show trials after an autistic boy was threatened for lightly scuffing a copy of the Koran?
The elite class does not want us to ask these questions because to do so would threaten the dominance of a class that is no longer confident and secure in its position. This is why it is now trying to justify even harsher restrictions on free speech, free expression, free assembly, and dissent.
This is why terms like “far right” and “Islamophobia” will now be expanded to silence and stigmatise not only those idiotic thugs who are destroying their own communities but millions of ordinary people who both object to those thugs and the disastrous policies the elite class has imposed on them from above.
This is why we will be told that in order to defend democracy we must not change the direction of travel but rather give up even more of our freedoms and rights, shut down alternative media, deplatform dissenters, and hand even more power to the elite class.
This is why Keir Starmer’s first instinct was not to acknowledge the wider public mood, speak across party lines and set out a plan of action but instead announce tighter restrictions and enhanced state surveillance to manage “the far right”.
So too was it revealing that a senior government advisor, Lord Woodcock, openly called for Covid-style lockdowns to shut down the protests and squash dissent.
And so too was it revealing that even one candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party suggested the state ban the English Defence League –a street movement that has not operated in any serious way for more than a decade.
In this way, the elite class calls to defend liberalism while simultaneously ushering in a dark new authoritarianism that is not liberal at all. Stifling and suffocating debate, shutting down dissent, and screaming at writers who challenge this groupthink are not the signs of an elite class that is confident and comfortable in its own position; they are the signs of an elite class that can sense it is starting to lose control.
And now many people out there can see it for themselves. So, this is not simply about “far-right thuggery”; this is about the unravelling and disastrous effects of an elite project that’s hollowed out, divided, and weakened Britain over many years.
A project that has subjected the British people and their children to increasing crime, chaos, communalism, the balkanisation of their communities, and increasingly chilling atrocities while simultaneously expecting the British people not to react at all.
What Keir Starmer needs to do —right now— is stop talking only about “far right thuggery” and start talking about violent offenders from all communities.
Starmer and Yvette Cooper need to stop talking only about defending mosques and start talking about defending all of our communities.
They need to stop obsessing about notions of “misinformation” and social media and start recognising that people's concerns about illegal and legal immigration are legitimate and need addressing.
They need to stop pretending two-tier policing has not happened, acknowledge mistakes were made and recommit all public institutions to political neutrality.
And they need to start showing they are dealing with the underlying issues by, firstly, doing whatever necessary to regain control of our borders and slow the pace of immigration and segregation in this country. And they need to start doing all these things now.
Because while the elite class might tell people in Orwellian fashion to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears, what the events of the last few days reveal is that a rapidly growing number of people in this country are now refusing to play along.
The curtain in this country is being pulled back to reveal not just the mindless thugs who have become useful idiots for the elite class but, more importantly, for a much larger number of people, what the policies of this elite class have done to Britain.
And now that the curtain has been pulled back, and the light has poured in, it cannot simply be closed —no matter what the elite class might tell us.
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/no-this-is-not-just-far-right-thuggery
*******************************************August 05, 2024
Big medical day today
So no new blog posts. Should be back tomorrow
August 04, 2024
Harris Gets Caught In A Shameless Lie Right Out Of The Gate
When CNN calls out a Democrat for lying, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. That’s just what happened last week, after Kamala Harris’ first campaign rally.
“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” she said in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda. Like, we know we got to take this seriously. And can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages.
“When you read it,” she goes on, “you will see Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare. They intend to end the Affordable Care Act and take us back, then, to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions.”
CNN, to its credit, read the 900-page document, or at least skimmed it, and in an article headlined “Fact check: Harris falsely claims Project 2025 blueprint calls for cutting Social Security,” it reports that:
The Project 2025 document does not show that Trump intends to cut Social Security; the document barely discusses Social Security at all and does not propose cuts to the program. In addition, contrary to Harris’ suggestion, Project 2025 does not call to ‘end’ the Affordable Care Act or eliminate its protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The document does criticize the Affordable Care Act, especially the law’s expansion of Medicaid, but makes clear it is advocating changes to the law rather than terminating the law entirely. (emphasis added)
In other words, Harris is just making sh*t up.
But that’s not all she’s lying about. The claim that Project 2025 is a “Trump agenda” is also a lie.
Project 2025 is a project led by the Heritage Foundation, which brought together more than 100 conservative organizations to detail a policy agenda that it published in a book early last year called “Mandate for Leadership.” This a guide that Heritage has been publishing every four years since 1980. The purpose is to provide the next administration with an encyclopedia of policy prescriptions endorsed by conservatives. Up until this year, nobody outside policy circles noticed.
Trump himself has repeatedly made it clear that his campaign wasn’t involved in Project 2025 and has lately started calling some of its ideas “extremist.” Which is an unfortunate sop on his part to the left’s coordinated campaign to demonize the policy document.
The Project 2025 lies had gotten so bad that Heritage had to put up an entire page debunking them, and internet memes started popping up making fun of the horror stories being spread, such as the one below.
Last week, the Harris team admitted that it’s been lying about Project 2025.
A campaign official told CNN that Harris “made a deliberate decision to brand all of Trump’s policies” as “Project 2025,” since they believe “it has stuck with voters.”
In other words, lying is fine, so long as it’s for the “greater good” of defeating Trump.
It’s still lying. After Project 2025’s director stepped down, with the Trump campaign cheering that on, the Harris campaign said “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country.” And then it repeated the lie about how it includes “cuts to Social Security and Medicare, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, dirtier air and water, and empowering Trump to destroy American democracy.”
Expect much, much, much more of the same from Harris over the next three months. Just don’t expect the rest of the corporate media to do what CNN did and call her out on any of it.
To view online: https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/01/harris-gets-caught-in-a-big-fat-lie-right-out-of-the-gate/
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Monthly mortgage payments have more than doubled since Jan. 2021 as Harris bragged we are ‘putting a lot of money in the streets of America’
By Robert Romano
“We gave them a great country with essentially no inflation. And after two years, they drove this country and they drove inflation through the roof. Two years, cost of living went up in some cases by over 50 percent. They say 22 percent. They like to say 22 but it could be much higher and it is much higher depending on what they include. They don't include things like interest rates...”
That was former President Donald Trump speaking at the Bitcoin Conference on July 27, stating that once interest rates and other increases are included, the cost of living has skyrocketed for American households.
Trump is right. There is no question.
In fact, monthly mortgage payments with higher interest rates and greater home values have more than doubled since Jan. 2021, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve and Freddie Mac data. Let’s break it down.
According to the Freddie Mac home price index, home values in the U.S. have increased by 35 percent since Jan. 2021. Meaning a house that cost $250,000 then would go for $337,000 today.
Additionally, 30-year mortgage interest rates have increased from about 2.65 percent on Jan. 7, 2021 to a current 6.78 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.
Using an amortization calculator, that shows if you purchased a home for $250,000 before former President Donald Trump left office, with the low interest rate of 2.65 percent, the monthly payment with principal and interest would be $1007.
Now, say you had to refinance for whatever reason, or get a new mortgage for a home priced at $250,000, at 6.78 percent, the monthly payment rises to $1,626. That’s a 61.4 percent increase.
But home values did not remain the same. With inflation drive up average home values by 35 percent, the home that cost $250,000 in 2021 now costs $337,000. That’s great if you’re selling your home, not so great if you’re buying one.
Then, with the higher interest rate of 6.78 percent, the monthly payment on the $337,000 mortgage rises to $2,192. That is an 117 percent increase in monthly mortgage payments — for the same house!
One impact of these catastrophic cost of living increases is it is killing home sales. In Jan. 2021, existing home sales were at a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of 6.69 million units sold. Whereas, by June 2024, it is all the way down to an annualized 3.89 million units sold, as 41.8 percent decrease.
As a result, the Fed has had to keep its own interest rate high at 5.25 percent to 5.5 percent in its July 31 meeting as it acknowledged that inflation “remains somewhat elevated.” No kidding.
And so, the cost of shelter in the Consumer Price Index measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is up just 21.6 percent since Jan. 2021. It’d be even higher, but Americans cannot afford to move with the crushing inflation.
That is the price of inflation, and the cost of the nearly $7 trillion printed, borrowed and spent into existence in both 2020 and 2021.
Apparently, the $2.2 trillion spent on the overwhelmingly bipartisan CARES Act in 2020 that Republicans and Democrats supported was not enough for the then-incoming President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Not even as 16 million out of the 25 million jobs temporarily lost during Covid were already recovered by Jan. 2021.
By the time Trump left office, the M2 money supply had already increased by $4.1 trillion, almost 27 percent, from $15.29 trillion in Jan. 2020 to $19.4 trillion in Jan. 2021.
The context was the national and global economy were locked down, schools closed, millions out of work and prices were collapsing. For example, oil briefly went below zero dollars a barrel as Americans stopped driving to work.
No, Biden and Harris wanted an economic stimulus of their own to take “credit” for, and so another $1.9 trillion for the very partisan American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 that only Democrats supported was spent by Congress and signed into law by Biden.
Throwing more fuel onto the fire, Biden then proposed and the Democratic-led Congress passed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act with $891 billion of green energy subsidies and other spending included. Biden signed it and Harris supported it.
By April 2022, the M2 money supply had increased another $2.6 trillion to $22 trillion, a further 13.6 percent.
Making matters worse, the Federal Reserve waited until consumer inflation was already at 7.5 percent in Jan. 2022 and Russia invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022 exacerbating the global supply chain crisis before it began hiking interest rates in March 2022 to curtail the consequences, intended and unintended, of all the spending. By June 2022, consumer inflation peaked at 9.1 percent.
Note that within a month of the Fed beginning the interest rate hike cycle, the M2 money supply peaked. But the Fed could have acted much sooner. By June 2021, consumer inflation had already crossed to 5.4 percent after Congress acted again. If Congress had not created the additional stimulus in 2021 and the Fed had just begun raising interest rates in the first half of 2021, about half or more of the pain being felt now could have already been alleviated, and President Biden would likely be cruising to reelection.
In other words, there definitely was going to be inflation even if Biden-Harris had done nothing on the fiscal side, which was precisely the thing to do. Congress and the Fed had already primed the pump sufficiently at that stage. But they kept going, along with the Fed, which by that point should have already begun hiking interest rates but didn’t, and so both unnecessarily extended the stimulus all the way through 2021 and into 2022.
And Harris took credit for it. On April 29 at the Economic Opportunity Tour in Atlanta, Ga. Harris stated, unironically, “we are in the process of putting a lot of money in the streets of America…” Yup. We know.
While the American people have been paying the price for all the inflation the entire time, it could be Harris who finally pays the price in November, as voters angry with the status quo say it’s time for a change when they head to the polls. Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
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August 1, 2024
The SIX fatal secrets about Harris's dirty past, her lies and hypocrisy that she'll wish you didn't know
Just because Joe Biden isn't capable of being president doesn't mean Kamala Harris is.
Yet we are now suffering through another unthinking coronation by the liberal media, their emotional incontinence soiling any iota of critical thought.
The great exhale after pushing out Biden – a president shunted into power by a Democrat elite that knew, all too well, how compromised he was, cognitively and otherwise – has given way not to reassessment but to re-enactment.
Rather than learn from their past, Dems and their establishment enablers are basking in a post-Joe glow while making the same mistake again: unifying behind a candidate who is patently unsuited to the job.
To elect Kamala Harris would be disastrous for many reasons, least of all this: It would mean that America, after realizing that a shadow government may have been in control for the last four years, is perfectly comfortable with electing another figurehead. A puppet.
A healthy political party would be in revolt. But not the Dems, who can assuredly point to Harris's surging poll numbers.
Some surveys already have her overtaking Donald Trump in swing states, while her approval rating steadily rises.
Hollywood loves her. The megadonors are back to the tune of $200 million and counting. The party has coalesced around Kamala while Team Trump finds itself, just weeks after the attempted assassination, on the back foot.
Kamala's ascendancy is a 'sucker punch', according to Trump's running mate J.D. Vance, who was recorded speaking freely at a fundraiser in Minnesota on July 21.
'The bad news,' Vance said, 'is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden… [she] is a lot younger [and] obviously not struggling in the same ways.'
All true. And Trump is already on the defensive, out front making race-baiting remarks about the pronunciation of Harris's first name, blasting her as 'crazy' and seemingly running scared from agreeing to debate her.
Meanwhile, Vance is struggling to dig himself out of the 'childless cat ladies' comment — one that, in a post-Roe era, lands terribly with female swing voters.
So, yes, Trump and Vance are in new terrain. But this Harris bump will end.
Why? Simply put, Kamala Harris is not the best candidate.
She is not the brightest. She is a political hack, a mediocrity who — like her current boss — found herself the beneficiary of luck and timing rather than grit and intellect.
If anything binds Biden and Harris, it's this unfortunate trait: Both seem to know, deep down, that they're frauds. That their ambition long ago outstripped their competence.
It's why Biden is given to cringeworthy displays of what he sees as machismo: The 'make my day, pal' threat to Trump pre-debate, or the oft-told tale of taking down 'Cornpop' at the community pool.
Real tough guys don't tell you they're tough, just as genuinely smart people don't tell you they're smart.
Kamala never seems quite comfortable in her own skin, and that's a fatal flaw in a presidential candidate.
Even her ex-lover Willie Brown, the now 90-year-old former Mayor of San Francisco who helped ease her way into politics, doesn't think Harris has what it takes.
Harris, as he recently told Politico, suffers from 'the Hillary syndrome… people don't like her.'
And when Harris has to speak for herself and do so off-the-cuff, she can't.
Here is just one example of her tautological word salad, after a mass shooting in Chicago in 2022:
'We've got to take this stuff seriously', she said to local press, 'as seriously as you are because you have been forced to take this seriously.'
There's a reason that the HBO satire 'Veep' — in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus played a vainglorious, incurious, power-mad politician who lucked into the Oval Office — is enjoying a resurgence.
'The crazier politics gets,' showrunner David Mandel said recently, 'the more 'Veep' holds up.'
Except 'Veep' never predicted Trump. And it seems at least one party elder had to be dragged over to Team Harris.
Yes, none other than Barack Obama, who called for an open nominating process at the Democratic National Convention in a written statement just hours after Biden announced he would step aside.
'I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges,' Obama wrote.
Kamala Harris went unmentioned.
One would think that Obama, of all people, would quickly get behind the candidacy of the first female president, herself black. But no.
'Obama is very upset,' a source told the New York Post last week, 'because he knows she can't win'.
As the liberal media luxuriates in 'Kamalot' and 'Kamalove', let's look at why Obama — despite latterly joining wife Michelle to publicly, awkwardly endorse Harris — might well be distressed.
And why top Dem strategist James Carville says he is sure Harris's high approval ratings will fall once this honeymoon period ends.
'She's going to get slaughtered,' Carville said last week.
And why Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, days before Biden stepped aside, took to social media to reveal that the party itself had doubts about Harris.
'If you think there is a consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave… that they would support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,' she said.
Let's count the reasons why.
No.1: Harris owns the border
Despite attempts by the liberal media to claw back Harris's appointment as Biden's 'border czar', it is indisputably true that she was deputized as such.
'Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the 'root causes' that drive migration' – that's a report from Axios dated April 14, 2021.
By the end of this administration, an estimated 10 million migrants will have crossed into the United States illegally.
Among those are potentially hundreds of known terrorists. And then there's the unknown number of 'gotaways' who have evaded border control.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News on Monday that Harris has contacted him 'zero times' throughout her tenure.
Here's Harris during her infamous June 2021 interview with NBC's Lester Holt, who asked why she still hadn't been to the border:
Harris: 'We've been to the border.'
Holt: 'You haven't been to the border.'
Harris: 'I haven't been to Europe.' [Awkward cackling] 'I don't understand the point that you're making.'
No.2: She has repeatedly vouched for Biden's physical and cognitive health
Harris has done this for years, insisting as recently as February that 'we have a very bold and vibrant president in Joe Biden… Our president is in good shape, in good health, and is ready to lead in our second term'.
There are only two explanations for this: Either Harris was kept so far out of the president's loop, privy to nothing of importance, that she had no idea he was in such terrible shape.
Or, more likely to my mind, she lied to the American people out of self-interest.
No.3: She's an alleged bully
Since taking office as VP, Harris has had a staff turnover rate of almost 92 percent, according to a top government watchdog.
Such churn-and-burn has apparently been a Harris hallmark throughout her two decades in public service.
She is reportedly well-known for cursing out her staff, for chasing her most talented hires out the door, and refusing to read her briefing books, then exploding at her staff for being unprepared.
'It's clear that you're not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work,' one ex-staffer told the Washington Post in 2021. 'With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you're constantly sort of propping up a bully and it's not really clear why.'
Again, Harris shares these failings — the alleged lashings-out at loyal staff, the tantrums and the blame-shifting — with President Biden. It all speaks to someone intellectually, interpersonally incapable of executing the most stressful job in the world.
No.4: Even for a politician, she's particularly craven
After accusing Biden of backing historically racist policies during a televised June 2019 presidential debate — causing Biden to reportedly say during a commercial break, 'Well, that was some f***ing bull****', and forever earning the enmity of Jill Biden — Harris, who dropped out of that race with a 3 percent approval rating, accepted his VP slot.
Biden, remember, caved to pressure to select a black woman as his running mate.
She has also shamelessly shape-shifted from being a tough-on-crime prosecutor, who oversaw more than 1,900 marijuana convictions, to a pro-defund-the-police ally.
Now, of course, she's backtracking once more, tacking center, and boasting of her time in law enforcement.
No.5: Zero foreign policy experience and zero backbone
Harris' husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish, yet Harris caves to the radicals in her own party, refusing to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wartime address to Congress last week.
When she finally did meet him, Harris warned Netanyahu that 'I will not be silent' over Gaza and that while Israel 'has the right to defend itself' (how condescending), 'how it does so matters'.
Days later, Hezbollah launched rockets into an Israeli playground, killing 12 children and injuring many more.
No.6: No stated premise or philosophy
'We're not going back' is the emerging Harris slogan, and I will say this – it's ingenious.
It allows the voter to project whatever meaning they like, and for women, many will surely interpret this as a call to restore reproductive rights in full. Such is the minefield the Trump-Vance ticket must navigate.
That said, Harris has no existential reason for running. She has no record, no real cause to show after four years as VP.
Right now, she's running on the fumes of relief and emotion, the attempt to turn her into your 'cool wine aunt', a Gen Z 'brat' who is messy and relatable – but this all has a very short shelf life.
If Kamala Harris can't project confidence, purpose and a real, actionable agenda, she will remain nothing but a figurehead — another empty suit that the true Dem powerbrokers put forward as their latest useful idiot.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13695051/Kamala-Harris-Trump-election-MAUREEN-CALLAHAN.html
*******************************************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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