“Pre-Game Warm-Up - The Great Debate Tonite”

“Pre-Game Warm-Up - The Great Debate Tonite”

Joe Sullivan,Layers_Of_Truth

This morning, at the expense of dating myself, I‘m thinking about when I was a youngster back when John F. Kennedy ran against Richard M. Nixon leading up to the 1960 Presidential Election. Nixon was then the Vice President in Eisenhower’s administration. Kennedy was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.

Both men were respected for their past accomplishments. Both men had prevailed in winning their respective party’s nominations. The 3 major networks ABC, CBS and NBC had discussed their political differences in ways that were factually fair and correct - but (in those days) the networks didn’t engage in using language that minimized the character of the candidates. The networks reported the pre-debate “news” in generally neutral terms…

The Kennedy-Nixon Debate was the first Presidential Debate to be televised. However, most American families did not have televisions and the majority listened on the radio. After the debate, the majority who listened thought that Nixon had won - but the majority of those who watched thought that Kennedy had won…. The media commentators pointed out that while Kennedy looked “tanned and rested”, Nixon looked “pale and nervous”… 

In my opinion, this was the beginning of an unfortunate trend in American politics where the way candidates “look” on television became increasingly more important than what they actually “said” or “stood for”. Increasingly over time, “ISSUES” gradually became less important than “PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES” and “SOUND BYTES” - both of which are media inventions… just like selling “soap” in commercials.

Similarly, Presidential Debates have devolved since the “Age of Television” began. In 1960, the two candidates stood at podiums and answered questions from Howard K. Smith of ABC News. They listened quietly and respectfully while their opponent spoke and were then given an opportunity to respond. It was all appropriate and dignified…

Modern debates from recent elections have been characterized by occasional interruptions and sarcasm - as well as facial gestures while the opponent is speaking. These are strategies intended to intimidate the opponent and break their concentration while they’re speaking…. None of these strategies would work unless the debates were televised…. 

On that point - it is now the case that the journalists who conduct the questioning are now considered “media personalities” in their own right who have risen to national prominence over many years. Consequently, they conduct the questioning by instilling their own attitudes toward the candidates. In that way - they make themselves part of the coverage. Often, these same “personalities” have clashed with the candidates in previous interviews or otherwise revealed their own bias for the individual candidates. Some of these media “types” have previously served in government before joining the media. In one infamous case, such a person was Donna Brazille - who actually gave the list of questions to candidate Hillary Clinton before the debate!

Modern Presidential Debates are essentially a media-driven production where each campaign looks to install aspects of their appearance or their opponent’s persona to gain their own advantage on camera. The questions asked are often dodged as the candidates try to use “talking points” to send a separate message to the audience. When the opponent is given time to respond or rebut - they often use their time to underscore their own “talking points”…

Frankly, these “media events” are no longer “real debates” - and the public interest is now poorly served…

IN CONCLUSION… Don’t expect anything truly significant from tonite’s debate. Both candidates have a strategy going in and both of them will follow the “script” that they and their handlers have practiced. I expect that because of the extraordinary influence of media commentators the public perception of the candidates BEFORE the debate will be reinforced AFTERWARD.

WITH THAT SAID…. I believe that PRESIDENT TRUMP will surprise many tonite by focusing on his PLANS for how his administration will address the future. Those who expect him to attack Kamala Harris personally will be generally disappointed. Kamala Harris will try to avoid accounting for her record with Biden and try instead to engage in her plans to “tax the rich” to pay for the needs of the “under-served” in American society. In that way she will be running on ENVY and CLASS WARFARE…

President Trump will give undecided voters something to vote FOR while Harris will reveal that the future will largely be “MORE OF THE SAME” if she’s elected.

As President Lincoln said: “You can fool ALL of the people SOME of the time; you can fool SOME of the people ALL of the time - but you can’t fool ALL of the people ALL of the time.”

God Bless You  God Bless America

America is STILL the Hope of the World! 

VOTE!

The Biden-Harris World Is Afire

 

The Biden-Harris World Is Afire

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Somehow the United States ended up this summer with no engaged president and an absent vice president who avoids the missing president and is frantically repudiating everything she co-owned the last three years.

The world was already confused over how President Joe Biden was apparently declared by unnamed Democratic insiders and donors unfit and unable to continue as their presidential candidate—as if he were a dethroned Third-World usurper.

It further wondered how those who staged his removal had no problem allowing him, in his debilitated state, to continue as America’s commander-in-chief until January 20, 2025. They demonstrated their priorities that focus on retaining power, not the welfare of the nation or the will of over 14 million Biden primary voters.

Vice President Kamala Harris, until Biden’s forced abdication, was judged by these same backroom fixers as too incompetent to ever be commander-in-chief and thus for three years a good reason why Biden apparently was not forced out earlier.

Now nominal Vice President Harris is on the campaign trail nonstop, while Biden has taken the most vacation time off and worked the shortest workweek in presidential memory.

The world again wonders who is in charge, what they believe, who is a friend, and who is an enemy. Harris is busy trying to get elected on three premises: disowning her prior co-ownership of what was mostly a disastrous Biden term and certainly no recommendation for reelection; reinventing her affluent radical past and present as moderate and working-class; and keeping absolutely silent about any detailed agenda or policy plan for governance as president.

Our rivals and opponents abroad cannot decide which is better for their own anti-American agendas—a derelict and absent Biden-Harris or dealing with a cognitively challenged Biden and a linguistically loopy Harris?

So, again, who or what now governs America?

Is it Biden again at the beach or closing up shop at noon for his nap and early bedtime?

Or is it Vice President Harris, far from the White House, out campaigning and confused over who she really is or wants to be, what, if anything, she plans on doing if elected president, and how to avoid any unscripted moment?

Or are our real rulers the stealth cabal of Democratic grandees and billionaire donors who arranged the Biden presidency by forcing out his 2020 primary rivals, staged the conspiratorial silence about his real disabilities for well over three years, ambushed him, and forced him off the Democratic ticket, and are now frantically reinventing Kamala Harris as capable and centrist when just a few months ago they had written her off as incompetent and a hopeless wannabe California radical?

As a result, a confused but also encouraged world of enemies watches the listless United States and wonders whether to try something stupid.

In this widening vacuum, lots of foreign opportunists, outright enemies, and nihilists are seizing the day—on the assurance that Biden is not a lame duck, but a lame, lame duck, and Harris is a near functionary in search of an identity and an idea.

The Houthis, a ragtag cabal of terrorists who hijacked Yemen after shaking off a few prior Biden “precision” retaliatory strikes, now “own” the Red Sea. They just hit a Greek-flagged oil tanker that is now adrift and polluting the Red Sea. It serves as their warning for commercial ships to keep clear of their mare nostrum.

The Houthis expect neither a Western nor an American response to ensure safe transit in and out of the southern Mediterranean by the world’s commercial fleet. Apparently, they believe that they are so backward, and their drones are so cheap and simple that the top-heavy U.S. cannot afford to hit their ad hoc launches with sophisticated, multimillion-dollar, and often misapplied weapons. And they are probably right.

Indeed, under Biden-Harris, the world has now lost free and safe transit in the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Will the Caribbean or mid-Atlantic be next? The military is short thousands of troops, the merchant marines idling ships.

Our NATO enemy/“ally” Turkey—when it is not threatening to send missiles against fellow NATO member Greece, bragging about once again ethnic cleansing Armenians, leveling more warnings to Cyprus, bombing the Kurds, colluding with the Russians and Chinese, trying to veto Finnish and Swedish NATO membership, or claiming US nuclear weapons based in Turkey are virtually its own—apparently has created such an anti-American climate that its pro-Erdogan street thugs feel they can beat up visiting American sailors, docking at Izmir to help aid the Turkish navy.

Not a peep follows from the White House. If it had, President Recep Erdogan would have leveled one of his accustomed unhinged responses.

Hamas just murdered more of its Israeli hostages, among them an American citizen.

Now non-candidate Biden is apparently still more worried about 250,000 Muslim voters in Michigan (who profess more solidarity with Hamas than lament the murder of a fellow citizen) than US interests in the Middle East. He customarily and matter-of-factly issued one of his empty editorials before returning to form by performance art blasting Israel.

In Biden’s world, our closest and only democratic ally in the Middle East is at fault because it will not, this election year, give constant concessions to the murderous Hamas clique. Biden-Harris forget that Hamas started the current war by butchering 1,200 Israelis at a time of peace, scrambled back to its subterranean labyrinth with over 250 hostages, hid their terrorist killers under schools, hospitals, and mosques, murdered any who were about to be rescued by Israeli forces, and promised to kill more if rescue attempts continue.

The Biden-Harris messaging seems simple: pro-Western, civilized, and consensually governed nations are rational and so listen to the U.S. and therefore should be leveraged and often punished for rationality; anti-American, medieval, and theocratic terrorist cabals do not and therefore should be appeased and exempted from criticism or retaliation given their lawlessness.

Normally, when asked about foreign threats to harm Americans or their interests, Biden gives one of his accustomed blowhard, one-word threats, “Don’t!” That empty and tired banality is now interpreted abroad as zero consequences will follow when you harm America. As a general rule, an animated Biden is far more likely to threaten to beat up or go after Trump than Hamas or Iran.

Harris has been mum—other than her usual on the one hand/on the other hand vacuity. Her vice presidential candidate running mate, the usually frenetic and loquacious Tim Walz, when asked directly about the murder of an American hostage, similarly goes mum—and simply waved off the question and turned away. Walz seems as terrified as Harris of any unrehearsed utterance, as if he knows only his silence masks his foolery.

Brazil, as was warned by many, is heading toward full-scale Latin American communism of the Venezuela/Nicaragua/Cuba sort. It is now waging a censorship war against Elon Musk with the tacit approval of the Biden-Harris consortium—for the crime of turning the former useful Twitter leftwing and censored megaphone into a global free speech pavilion.

Ukraine has now been inside Mother Russia for weeks, which is strategically understandable but geo-strategically dangerous against a nuclear hyperpower run by a ruthless dictator. Biden has no clue what the U.S. is doing other than supplying enough arms to Ukraine not to lose but more than enough to trigger a wider theater war. Ask Biden and Harris what the U.S. strategy is on Ukraine, and one will mumble incomprehensibly, the other, if unguarded, plunge into a circular word salad about the “art of diplomacy” or “democratic fragility.”

Iran is more afraid of an Israeli response than U.S. threats.

Or is it worse than that? Does the theocracy now rely on Biden-Harris to restrain any Israeli retaliation for the tens of thousands of rockets launched by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran against the Jewish state.?

All Biden-Harris had to do was continue the Trump protocol of warning Iran to stay out of the conflict. Instead, it de facto greenlighted the Iranian supply chain to Hamas and Hezbollah and turned all of them loose to murder.

In truth, US foreign policy toward Iran is the resumption of the Obama-era embrace of the supposed underdog Shiite/Persian counterweight to Gulf moderates and democratic Israel. Biden-Harris cares not a whit whether Iran goes nuclear and might even in their warped Ben-Rhodes/Barack Obama-era imbecility tacitly support such nuclearization to “rein in” the Jewish state.

Mexico’s outgoing “president,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has now unabashedly also gone full communist. As he preps the way for his even harder-left successor, Obrador is seeking to destroy what is left of Mexico’s democracy.

AMLO, remember, bragged of the tens of millions of illegal aliens that Mexico drove out and into the U.S.—especially given the $60 billion in remittances they send to prop up an otherwise failed narco-state. In retirement, he will brag that he was the first Mexican president to destroy the U.S. border.

He even urged all Mexican-American expatriates to vote anti-Republican. For the next few months, he will cooperate with the US to slow down the influx northward in order to allow Harris-Biden to claim they are for pre-November 5 election-cycle “border security.” And thereby help Harris get elected and welcome in another 10 million illegal aliens.

In his delusions, AMLO—who proved one of the truly dangerous anti-Americans on the world stage—thinks he is winning phase two of the 19th-century Mexican War. In fact, all he is proving is that millions of Mexicans want out of his country and only romanticize it when they are safely and permanently distant from its numerous failed paradigms.

In sum, there really is no President Biden or Vice President Harris. The former is non compos mentis and failing ever more rapidly. The latter has no clue who she is or what she should do. The cabal that engineered their respective exits and entrances cares more about retaining power than using it for American interests.

So, we are in perilous times.

All of our enemies and even former neutrals are coming out of the woodwork. They are convinced that the next two months offer one-time advantages—unless Harris is elected and thus can extend their opportunities for four more years of what Americans see as a chaotic decline, but the world abroad views as a rare and ripe opportunity.

No "Nicer' Way to say "I'm Guilty"

 

Hunter Biden Discovers There is No "Nicer' Way to say "I'm Guilty"

Jonathan Turley, johnathanturley.org 

Below is my column in Fox.com on the Hunter Biden guilty plea. The plea proved vintage Hunter Biden for all of the wrong reasons. The effort to plead guilty without admitting guilt left him looking like the most privilege person since Marie Antoinette. However, it was consistent with a bizarre criminal defense that never seemed connected to a legal strategy. In a twist on the famous tag line from Love Story, Hunter believed that being a Biden “is never having to say you’re guilty.”

Here is the column:

“Guilty.” That word repeated nine times by Hunter Biden in a federal courtroom in California represented something that he had evaded for much of his life: accountability.

Five years ago, Biden had to explain the rule to ABC News reporter Amy Robach, who had the audacity to ask about his history. Biden instructed the TV journalist to “say it nicer.”

The president’s son spent his adult life with his father, his family, political allies, and reporters enabling every corrupt deal and human debauchery. Even at his plea hearing, Biden was closely shadowed by his so-called “sugar brother” Kevin Morris, who bankrolled his lavish lifestyle for years.

This week, Biden was still demanding that even prosecutors “say it nicer” on the eve of his criminal trial. He created chaos at the start of jury selection by announcing that he would plead guilty but demanded an “Alford plea.” The Alford plea allows a defendant to accept that there is sufficient evidence to convict while declining to admit guilt.

Roughly 17 percent of state cases and 5 percent of federal cases end in Alford or no contest pleas. However, as a criminal defense attorney, I have never heard of a defendant seeking an Alford plea without previously discussing the option with prosecutors. These pleas ordinarily require the approval of prosecutors and Justice Department rules require the approval of high-ranking officials or the Attorney General himself.

Prosecutors were gobsmacked by Biden’s sudden announcement and told the judge that they had not been consulted on the demand. Not surprisingly, they were miffed and quickly opposed any such plea.

The result was all too familiar for those of us who have witnessed the chaos of the Hunter Biden defense. After causing a stir, the effort failed and Biden was left standing in the courtroom repeating a standard guilty plea nine times.

It is the continuation of a legal strategy that could be best described as controlled chaos. In 2023, Biden stood with his lawyers in open defiance of a congressional subpoena outside of Congress. He demanded that the House committees meet his demands for appearing as a witness. After all the drama, the effort failed. Facing a criminal contempt sanction, he appeared as demanded by Congress and was later accused of perjury.

It was the same pattern that emerged when Biden secured a sweetheart plea deal that avoided any jail time, avoided a host of federal charges, and gave him sweeping immunity for unnamed offenses. It collapsed in court when the judge asked the prosecutor if he had ever seen such a deal offered to any other defendant. He admitted that he had not.

The response from the Biden team was the same privileged fit. One lawyer told prosecutors to “just rip it up.” Later the Justice Department attorneys stated that they still tried to reach a new plea deal but that Biden gave them the stiff arm.

The result? An unmitigated failure. Biden was convicted on every gun count before a sympathetic jury in the hometown of the Biden family.

This burning train then continued down the track to California where the team insisted that it would make the same addiction defense that failed in Delaware.  It then pulled another jump scare with the Alford plea demand.

From the beginning to the end, it is a series of total failures produced by sheer hubris. As I wrote in 2023, Biden ultimately was undone by his entitlement and appetite. He expects everyone from reporters to representatives to prosecutors to “say it nicer.”

At every stage, his bravado and defiance led to the worst possible result. Ironically, he had a prosecutor in David Weiss who fought to help him avoid any prosecution or jail time. Weiss allowed major felonies to expire for now explicable reasons and refused to indict Biden for being an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

Yet, somehow, Biden succeeded in forcing Weiss to prosecute him against every apparent inclination to the contrary.

In a statement after his guilty plea, Biden continued to seek to excuse his actions. Just hours after accepting guilt for federal felonies, he insisted that he did it only to protect those he loved: “I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment.”

It was strikingly belated. Biden could have avoided over a year of such “needless embarrassment” by pleading guilty last year. A plea at the time would likely have secured real benefits for him in sentencing recommendations. Instead, he waited literally until the start of his trial to enter a plea at the very last moment when it offered the least benefit to himself or his family.

Yet, the long road to “guilty” did bring clarity for others as well as Biden. There were no more of the mantras of how my son “has done nothing wrong” or legal experts struggling to rationalize his conduct. He now has over a dozen convicted crimes, including nine related to the millions that he acquired through a massive influence-peddling operation by the Biden family.

There is no way to say that “nicer.”

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

Emboldened Anti-censorship Movement

Emboldened anti-censorship movement takes on 2024

Zachary Basu, Axios 

An anti-censorship movement born from the chaos of COVID and cultivated on platforms like X is increasingly aligning with the Trump campaign — and scoring some big wins.

Why it matters: Championed by Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and disaffected liberals, this loose network of dissenters views censorship — real or perceived — as the existential question of the 2024 election.

• Axios has reported in the past on the growing movement of wealthy, anti-establishment renegades united mostly by their hatred of DEI policies, mainstream media and elite consensus.

• Presented with a binary choice this November, many, like Musk, are now explicitly supporting the candidate who hews most closely to their view of free speech: Donald Trump.

Zoom in: This week alone has produced two of the anti-censorship movement's biggest political breakthroughs.

1. On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the Biden administration had "pressured" Facebook in 2021 to "censor certain content" related to COVID-19 as part of its efforts to crack down on misinformation.

• Zuckerberg expressed "regret" over the situation, and also said Facebook had erred when it "temporarily demoted" a story about Hunter Biden's laptop in late 2020 out of concern that it was Russian disinformation.

• Conservative media and free speech advocates erupted over what they saw as an admission of Big Tech censoring "dissent" at the government's request.

2. On Tuesday, Trump named RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both former Democrats who have endorsed him, as honorary co-chairs of his presidential transition team.

• The new alliance was celebrated by elements of Trump's base, including Tucker Carlson, who has long sought to forge connections with anti-establishment voices on the left.

• With RFK Jr. by his side, Trump is making a more concerted push for independent, politically homeless voters who are inherently skeptical of the government and mainstream science.

The other side: Some conservatives expressed discomfort at the notion of ceding influence on policy and personnel to two longtime progressives — regardless of their evolution and newfound celebrity in MAGA world.

• Some anti-vaccine RFK Jr. supporters are also unhappy with his Trump endorsement, seeing the former president's championing of Operation Warp Speed as an unforgivable sin.

Reality check: RFK Jr. was polling only around 5% before endorsing Trump, and many of his most vocal online boosters were already in the former president's camp.

Between the lines: Some of the anti-censorship movement's most prominent leaders — Musk included — have been prone to spreading baseless conspiracy theories and misinformation about a range of topics.

• RFK Jr., for example, responded Monday to an X account claiming military pilots are pumping "chemtrails" into the atmosphere: "We are going to stop this crime," Kennedy wrote.

The big picture: Trump has always attracted anti-establishment support. But his heightened hostility toward the Justice Department, Big Tech and government bureaucrats since leaving office has deepened his populist appeal.

• Vice President Kamala Harris is expanding her coalition in her own ways, winning the endorsement this week of more than 200 former Bush, McCain and Romney staffers who fiercely oppose Trump.

What to watch: The anti-censorship movement views its enemies on a global scale, and has rapidly mobilized in support of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov after his arrest by French authorities this weekend.

• Durov has not been charged officially, but he faces allegations related to complicity in crimes associated with child exploitative material, fraud and drug sales on his messaging platform.

• "#FreePavel," Musk tweeted along with a clip of Durov praising X's commitment to free speech in an interview with Carlson.

This is the way

This is the way

The Mandalorian Creed

Don Jaffa

In July of 1964, at the Cow Palace, Senator Barry Goldwater said the words, that were written by Harry V Jaffa, in his acceptance speech: “Extremism in Defense of Liberty is not a vice, and, Moderation in Pursuit of Justice is no virtue.” No less than Bill Rehnquist assisted the Senator in the rest of the acceptance speech.

“Duty, Honor, Country,” became creed of West Point in 1898, and was repeated by Douglas McArthur in his farewell address at West Point in 1962. Behind these modest calls to the American founding, it was Abraham Lincoln who prophesized that only we can destroy the founding and ourselves.  This is the precipice on which we tremble at the edge. We are facing a hydra of communist Marxist socialist tentacles that have been growing for a century or more, and are now risen to destroy us.

One of the lessons of the Mandalorian Creed is the phrase "one does not speak unless one knows.” One of the subliminal auras of the science fiction genre, at least the successful ones, is the message of good versus evil and the triumph of the good. Of the original Star Trek episodes, each episode was a lesson in moral clarity. The episode on racial hate was evident to the most oblivious, as each race was colored black and white, but on opposite sides of the body, where the face made it most obvious. A subtle play on Swift’s Big Endian/Little Endian controversy, which was a satire of the heresy between the protestant and catholic faiths.

The motto of the USMC, ‘Semper Fideles,’ which remains, ‘ever Faithful,’ also encompasses never leaving a fallen comrade on the field of battle.

With clarity, the euphonious platitudes of the politics of ‘hope and joy,’ resound with the founding philosophy of Democrat John C Calhoun: “What is a positive good for the Master, is a positive good for the slave.’ The ‘Woke’ Progressive Liberal democrats have reverted to a sub rosa execution of the Calhounian principle that each state is sovereign, and that the exemplar is in the self destruction by the Democrat leadership in California, Illinois, New York and Maryland. These are the ‘bobble-head’ useful idiots of the far gone left.

The ‘underground railroad’ is now leading to Texas and Florida, and the massive migration will lead to the transfer in the House of Representatives to these states after the Enumeration of 2030 and the subsequent redistricting. There is no three fifths enumeration of illegal immigrants. And ‘Hope and Joy’ will not pass legislation to grant them a path to citizenship.

Between today and November 5th President Trump should have 4-6 campaign events in NFL football stadiums, with a debate lectern in the middle of the 50 Yard Line. And every element of what has gone wrong not just in the Biden presidency, but in every Democratic city in the past 50 or more years. An economic policy of economic opportunity (the Hope and Joy Policy} has been the reality of the past 250 years of the United States. The Harris-Walz response can be played in this gladiatorial location to a live crowd.

On their first day in office the Biden-Harris administration shut down the American economy and ended millions of jobs, and started the process to bankrupt the American economy as well. On the first day in office the Trump-Vance team can start the process to reverse this Titanic course. Federalize the national guard and declare a 3 kilometer military zone along our southern border. Declare that any city, or any state, that has declared ‘Safe Haven’ for illegal immigrants, subject to the suspension of all federal spending until those declarations and privileges (including allowing illegal immigrants to vote in non federal elections) are reversed.  Compliance to release federal funding will require civil authorities in those states to supply at least 10,000 illegal immigrant to either US Marshals or ICE for repatriation to their home countries.

Here in the United States we have over a century of crude oil production, and during that time we have depended on the pressure in the oil fields to pump the crude. Those oil fields have gone ‘dry’ when the pressure in the field drops to zero. Using repressurization technology to bring these oil fields back on line represents 80-100 trillion dollars. This represents both a tool and a weapon, to reduce our national debt, and to bankrupt our enemies. A recent discovery also represents an additional 80 trillion in natural resources as well.

The vulnerable and abandoned resource which the Democratic political machine has abandoned, and mostly forgotten, is the youth in the major democratic strongholds. Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and NYC, have an unblemished record of non-performance in their school systems. They graduate mostly illiterate black and Latino teenagers who cannot perform or compete in the job market. This is the record of fifty years of Democratic political leadership. The academic left control of the NEA and other teacher unions have a history of ‘dumbing’ down teaching to ‘dumb’ down the graduates of these mostly African American communities.  We need to invest in our youth, not abandon them to mediocrity and being second class citizens. That investment needs to be in the on going creation of Lincoln Academies.

'Vacuous' Kamala Harris Interview

NY Times columnist says 'vague',

'vacuous' Kamala Harris interview did not help her

'She struggled to give straight answers to her shifting positions on fracking and border security,' Bret Stephens wrote

Gabriel Hays, Fox News

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens published a scathing piece Friday that called Vice President Kamala Harris’ first sit-down interview as a 2024 candidate "vague" and "vacuous."

Stephens, a conservative columnist who’s vehemently opposed to former President Trump, laid into Harris’ performance, saying she offered little details about the policies she would enact as president, avoided straight answers, and relied on flimsy talking points, all while CNN anchor Dana Bash seemed reluctant to ask tough questions.

"But there was too much fluff in this interview to lay to rest doubts about Harris’s readiness for the highest office," Stephens declared.

Harris and Bash won some praise in liberal corners for the interview such as Poynter and a New York Times write-up, but conservatives unsurprisingly were harsher on the vice president and CNN, stating it was light on details regarding Harris’ policy proposals. 

Stephens did begin his column with the positive aspects of Harris’ interview, stating, "she came across as warm, relatable and — to recall Barack Obama’s famous 2008 exchange with Hillary Clinton — more than ‘likable enough.’"

He also praised her for refusing "to be baited into the identity-politics trap, emphasizing that she was running for president ‘for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,’" and for distinguishing herself from former President Trump as someone who looks to "lift up" people as opposed to beating them down. 

Then came the negatives: "She was vague to the point of vacuous. She struggled to give straight answers to her shifting positions on fracking and border security other than to say, ‘My values have not changed.’"

He added, "she evaded the question of why it took the Biden administration more than three years to gain better control of the border, which it ultimately did through an executive order that could have been in place years earlier," and noted that the interview didn’t clear up "why she reversed her former policy positions."

Even CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called out Harris after she claimed during the interview that she "made clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking."

"The fact-check bottom line … is that she did not actually make clear at a 2020 debate that she had changed her previous support for a fracking ban," Dale said, citing transcripts from her debate with then-Vice President Mike Pence that showed she promised President Biden would not ban fracking.

Stephens continued, slamming Harris’ for her talking points, particularly her bit about her policy proposal to prevent so-called price gouging.

"Harris also relied on a few talking points that may not serve her well in the next two months. She mentioned price gouging, but Americans probably won’t believe that grocery chains with razor-thin profit margins are the real culprits when it comes to their rising food bills."

He added, "Her $100 billion plan to give first-time home buyers $25,000 in down payment support would mainly be an incentive for ever-higher home prices. Even Trump may be smart enough to explain just how inflationary the gimmick could be."

Stephens also called running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's presence during the interview a "bigger weakness" for Harris, writing, "Though he delivered a fine speech at the Democratic National Convention (brightly enhanced by his cheering son, Gus), he was transparently evasive in answering Bash’s questions about his misstatement about his military service, false claims about a D.U.I. arrest and misleading statements about his family’s fertility treatments."

"Tougher questions next time, please," he urged Bash.

The Harris campaign did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital's request for comment. 

The Examined Life

 

The Examined Life

Ignorance is not the only thing from which a true liberal education frees us

Robert P. George, Fair For All 

Those of us who teach or study at American colleges and universities are facing the academic year that is about to begin with more than a little trepidation. Will there be protests? Encampments? The occupation of buildings? The invasion of classrooms? Riots?

The fact that we are asking those questions should itself prompt us to ask a more fundamental question:  What is the purpose of higher education?

Most American colleges and universities proclaim themselves to be providers of “liberal education” (or “liberal arts education”). But what does that mean? Why should students want it? Why should their parents pay—a lot—for them to get it?

The word “liberal” in this context means “freeing.” So, what is it that liberal education is supposed to be freeing us from?

An obvious answer is that liberal education frees us from ignorance. A liberally educated person knows some things—some things worth knowing—about, for example, history, philosophy, literature, politics, economics, religion, civics, art, music, biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.

Liberal education is valuable in part because knowing the truth in these domains of inquiry is intrinsically desirable, and ignorance is inherently undesirable.

What’s more, a liberal education nurtures students’ abilities to read carefully, to think rigorously, and to write clearly.

Supporters of liberal education often point to these skills—and the demand for them by employers—when challenged to justify inviting students to devote four years (and tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars) to the study of “impractical” topics.

Ignorance, however, is not the only thing from which a true liberal education frees us. It frees us from conformism—that is, slavery to fashionable opinions and causes. A sure sign that a college or university is failing in its promise to provide a liberal education is the prevalence of ideological dogmatism and intolerance, and the presence of groupthink.

Many Americans today have concerns about higher education. They see spiking university costs and burgeoning student debt. They have entirely legitimate worries that ideological indoctrination has sometimes replaced genuine education. They see double standards on questions of freedom of speech—this is what got the university presidents who appeared before Congress in trouble—and they hear ludicrously false claims about the allegedly wide diversity of viewpoints on campus. They’re appalled that offices supposedly dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” sometimes promote the very opposite of these principles.

Abandoning the cause of liberal education, though, would be exactly the wrong response to these concerns. Instead, we should reform our colleges and universities by refocusing them on the purposes of liberal education: to form young men and women to be determined truth-seekers, courageous truth-speakers, and life-long learners.

Students formed in that way will lead an examined life, a life of critical—and self-critical—inquiry. People who lead examined lives are best equipped to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic republic.

That is the truth James Madison had in mind when he remarked that “only a well-instructed people can be permanently a free people.”

My friend and teaching partner Cornel West says that “the point of a liberal education is to learn how to die.” Students—and parents—are startled by Professor West’s provocative formulation, but it conveys a deep truth: It is from the perspective of our mortality that we can best wrestle with the questions of what is most important in life—what is true and good and beautiful.

There are some things that matter, to be sure, but at the end of the day don’t matter all that much—things like wealth, power, influence, status, prestige, and celebrity. These things aren’t bad in themselves, and it’s not necessarily wrong to want them—after all, they can be used in service of good ends. But they are not good in and of themselves—they are not the things that ultimately matter—those things that are worth having for their own sake.

The things that ultimately matter—the things that are desirable not merely as means to other ends, but as ends themselves—are things like family, friendship, faith, fairness, knowledge, beauty, honor, integrity and other virtues.

To distinguish the things that matter, but not all that much, from the things that really matter, it is necessary to lead an examined life. 

Living an examined life constitutes a necessary condition for the pursuit of what the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle called eudaimonia. While the term is often translated from the Greek as “happiness,” it is more precisely understood as flourishing or fulfillment. Eudaimonia requires that we subject our beliefs and behaviors to rigorous intellectual scrutiny—critically evaluating the values we live by and why we live by them, so that our death will mark the conclusion of a well-thought and well-lived life.

The examined life is, fundamentally, one of self-critical challenges—challenging and refining our beliefs, rather than believing whatever is convenient, fashionable, in line with our self-interest or our prejudices or coarse or base desires. It is not a life of doing as we please; it is rather a life devoted to seeking truth and living in line with truth, as best we grasp it, even when that means mastering our own wayward feelings, prejudices, or passions.

Practitioners of the examined life do not treat critics of their beliefs, even their most deeply cherished beliefs, as enemies. Far from trying to silence those who challenge their convictions, as happens so often today on campuses, they engage critics in a spirit of truth seeking, recognizing that we are all fallible and can be wrong—even about the questions most important to us.

Indeed, the acknowledgement of one’s own fallibility should lead the liberally educated person to be his or her own best critic. The process of constant self-examination, and the self-mastery required to live in line with truth as best one grasps it, is what a genuinely liberal education facilitates. 

Critics will say that I am proposing “ivory tower idealism” that universalizes a view of education which only our society’s elite possess the time and money to attain. But the intrinsic value of a liberal education does not only extend to students on campuses like Princeton and Harvard, or Amherst and Swarthmore. Everybody deserves—and ought—to live an examined life of the sort that is directly enabled by a liberal education, including those who attend community colleges, or vocational training programs, and even those who finish their formal education with high school. 

There’s no reason for community colleges and vocational programs to restrict themselves to providing the information and skills their students need to get a job. Indeed, many such institutions recognize this: students enrolled in professionally oriented programs (nursing or accounting, for example) often nevertheless are required to complete general education requirements through courses in the humanities and social sciences.

Even for students in professional and vocational programs, supplementary courses in the liberal arts contribute to forming them as practitioners of the examined life—people who can distinguish what matters, but not all that much, from what really matters.

Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, famously attributed to his own teacher, Socrates, the axiom that an unexamined life is not worth living. Authentic liberal education places its money on Socrates on that point.

Whatever comes in the new academic year, let’s remind ourselves of the deepest purposes of liberal education: to pursue knowledge that’s worth pursuing not merely as means to other ends, but also for its own sake; and to form students to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers—people who endeavor throughout their lives to liberate themselves from ignorance, prejudice, ideological dogmatism, and slavery to fashionable opinions and their own wayward desires.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as Chairman the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

'The Media vs. Donald J. Trump: the Russia Hoax'

'The Media vs. Donald J. Trump: the Russia Hoax'

Steven F. Hayward, The Pipeline 

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "The Media vs. Donald J. Trump: the Russia Hoax," by Steven F. Hayward. 

We now know that the “Russian collusion” narrative was cooked up as an opposition research project against Trump initially by the conservative Washington Free Beacon, but soon acquired and propelled by the Hillary Clinton campaign in the middle of 2016, after it became apparent that Trump had a slim but realistic chance of winning the election. The irony of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats mounting accusations of collusion with Russia is that there is scarcely anyone in American history with a deeper record of corrupt collusion with Russian interests than the Clintons.

As President Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton famously attempted to “reset” U.S.-Russia relations that had soured during the George W. Bush administration. Behind the scenes, Bill Clinton was assisting Rosatom, a Russian energy company, to acquire complete ownership of Uranium One, a Canadian mining company, that would make Russia a dominant supplier of the world’s uranium supply. (The acquisition required U.S. government approval because some of the company’s mines are in the United States.) Bill Clinton collected $500,000 for a single speech in Russia in 2010, his fee paid by an investment bank that was financing the Rosatom acquisition, and during which visit he met privately with Vladimir Putin.

During these years the Clinton Foundation was scooping up huge overseas contributions (the largest country of origin was Ukraine), all the while denying that Secretary of State Clinton exerted any influence over Russian transactions involving her husband and his foundation. Hillary said she had adopted strict conflict-of-interest rules, but everyone over the age of six understood the value to foreign donors of sending cash to the former president and possible next president. The simple proof of this is the complete collapse of foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation immediately upon the defeat of Hillary in November 2016. The foundation still has more than $300 million in assets.

You really can't hate them enough.

Following the Rosatom acquisition of Uranium One, the chairman of the Canadian-no-longer subsidiary sent a contribution of $2 million and $350,000 to the Clinton Foundation that the Clintons “forgot” to disclose. Other investors in Uranium One contributed a further $8.5 million to the Clinton Foundation between 2008 and 2010. To their credit, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported these dodgy dealings, though the reporting behind these stories was not done by Times or Post staff, but by independent investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, who gladly supplied the Times and the Post.

Naturally there was blowback in the newsrooms over these stories, and there was little to no follow up by the mainstream media. It is little wonder that Hillary Clinton thought she could easily get away with having an insecure private email server, and with a preposterous slander of her 2016 rival, Donald Trump. In any case, given that the Clintons had serious problems with their own Russia connections, it was perhaps a simple matter of what psychologists call “projection” to gin up an attack on Trump based on nothing more than Trump’s campaign statements expressing criticism of NATO and optimism about achieving the better relationship with Russia that Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration had promised and failed to deliver. In fact, the Clinton campaign’s own internal polling showed that her dubious ties to Russia were one of her largest vulnerabilities with voters.

Is it merely a coincidence that the principal agents in the Trump collusion hoax were former corporate media journalists? If there is a “patient zero” of the Trump collusion hoax (aside from Hillary), it is Glenn Simpson, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who founded Fusion GPS in 2011. Fusion GPS is described as a “strategic intelligence” consultancy based in Washington, D.C., and is the kind of enterprise that can only exist in Washington. Like many other such firms, its “assets” are the personal contacts of its principals (mostly other former reporters like Simpson), engaged in the political version of private investigative work (most frequently known as “opposition research”). Fusion GPS’s first target in 2012 was Mitt Romney, but other targets the company was hired to damage included anti-abortion activists and foreign business figures implicated in Russian money-laundering schemes.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign got its money’s worth, though peddling a preposterous claim of Russian collusion with Trump was pushing on an open door in most newsrooms...

Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, and lecturer at Berkeley Law. His most recent book is "M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom." He writes daily at Powerlineblog.com.

 

Kamala Harris is an 'empty suit'

 

Kamala Harris is an 'empty suit',

campaign handlers are worried, says Tulsi Gabbard

Former Democrat says Harris camp thinks voters are 'too stupid' to question VP's record

Fox News Staff, Foxnews.com 

While Kamala Harris' campaign works to rebrand the VP as the Democratic presidential candidate, critics are voicing concern over her record on the border, as well as her career as a prosecutor. On "America's Newsroom," Thursday, former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard labeled Harris an "empty suit," arguing her campaign "handlers" are worried about what will happen if she has to explain her policy positions.

TULSI GABBARD: I think she revealed in that debate the same thing that I think her campaign handlers are worried about right now... Kamala Harris is an empty suit. They are trying to create this new version of Kamala Harris to match what their pollsters are telling them, so she can say whatever she needs to say to try to win over voters, which is the most offensive thing, I think, because they think we're so stupid as to forget what her record actually is. In 2019, very simply, I confronted her with her hypocrisy of how what she said was very different than what she actually did, and she had no answer for it. She had no explanation. She didn't even try to own or justify what her actions were. And that's going to be the key thing here for voters as we head into this election is Kamala Harris will say whatever she thinks she needs to say. We have to pay attention to her actions, because on every single major issue, you will see that same kind of hypocrisy that I pointed out in 2019 where she'll say one thing, but her record tells a very, very different story. 

Gabbard called out Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris' "hypocrisy," referring back to an exchange during a debate in 2019 where Harris struggled to defend her record on criminal prosecutions. 

"Senator Harris says she's proud of her record as a prosecutor... but she put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations, and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana," Gabbard said in July 2019 on CNN. 

"I am proud of that work, and I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor, but actually doing the work," Harris responded. 

"The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you are in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people's lives, you did not... And the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology," Gabbard added. 

Harris previously held the office of San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General prior to her position as vice president. Her extensive 27-year career in criminal prosecution in California may pose challenges in appealing to moderate voters, reminiscent of obstacles she faced during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential bid.

Fox News' Jamie Joseph contributed to this report.

Our Three Silent Mice

Our Three Silent Mice

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Biden

President Biden was forced, unceremoniously and unwillingly, to abdicate from his impending reelection nomination. Since then, we have neither seen nor heard much from our sitting President. He has vanished, poof, gone.

This is quite unusual if not alarming. Unlike prior to the June 27 debate, the left now makes no effort to hide Biden’s debility. Indeed, it accepts the reality that an infirm Biden might not be able to finish out his remaining six months. Yet it still cannot decide whether the nation’s exposure to a President Harris prior to November 5 would lend her the advantage of incumbency or (more likely) ensure her defeat given global exposure to her puerility.

In the past, when a vice president took over the party nomination from his sitting president boss, the lame duck president was nonetheless evident and in charge until the duration of his tenure.

When Lyndon Johnson belatedly decided not to run for reelection in 1968, he claimed that he needed to devote his full attention and remaining months to finding a solution to the then-raging Vietnam War. Indeed, Johnson sought to steal interest away from his often-underappreciated vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and the latter’s ongoing (and failed) bid as the Democratic nominee to replace Johnson.

Ronald Reagan was still very busy in 1980 in his last six months as president—even as his sitting “a thousand points of light” vice president, George H.W. Bush, became the Republican nominee and was fixated on campaigning to replace Reagan.

At times in late 2000, during the waning days of Bill Clinton’s administration, a restless, lame duck Clinton seemed almost to compete for the spotlight with his then vice president, party nominee, and would-be Democratic presidential replacement Al Gore.

The vanishing Biden caught another case of COVID in mid-July shortly after his disastrous and historically early presidential debate with Trump. And in the subsequent month, Biden simply disappeared.

He is rarely seen, more rarely heard, even as Iran has promised a theater-wide war against Israel, Putin has more frequently threatened to escalate Russian attacks to existential levels, and the economy has witnessed dramatic stock shocks, dismal job news, and increasing talk of an impending recession.

Americans have wondered what happened to their president. Apparently, Biden was deemed unfit by his party bosses and donors to remain its nominee but still considered hale enough to continue for half a year as America’s president.

Rumors swirled that a depressed, embittered, and unwell Biden was in seclusion licking his wounds, acidic over being betrayed by his erstwhile allies—the Obamas, former speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, the left-wing squad, a traditionally obsequious and in-the-tank left-wing media, and perhaps his replacement, the machinating Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden gave a so-so endorsement of Harris. After that pro forma act, he has somehow evaporated in a fashion that has left the White House even more vacant than during the octogenarian Biden’s prior three years of customary three-day workweeks.

Will or can Biden campaign this summer and autumn for Harris?

And if he were mentally and physically able to do so, would it help or hurt her?

Are his policies—especially those toward Israel at the brink of a war with Iran—unchanged, or will he shift somewhat to help the Harris cause with pro-Hamas/anti-Israel voters in Michigan?

Or perhaps in his sullenness, will Biden remain indifferent to Harris, or at some point, reassert his lost authority even if, or perhaps because, it might prove injurious to her candidacy?

So, for the present, no one knows who is in charge of the United States.

Is it the three-year consortium headed by the omnipresent Obama tandem that had heretofore used Biden as a convenient waxen effigy?

Or is Jill Biden still playing the Edith Wilson role for a non compos mentis and invalid presidential husband?

Or is our de facto Commander-in-Chief the new presidential candidate Kamala Harris? She seems ebullient in welcoming to her team both Obama old-hands and Biden defectors eager for new jobs and billets, in “The king is dead; long live the king!” fashion.

The next six months may be the most dangerous in our modern history. Key geostrategic decisions concerning an opportunistic world eager to fill the widening American void will be made by whom, if anyone, and in what manner?

Harris

But stranger still is the month-long vaporization of Vice President and the now de facto Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. How weird that she sought to hog airtime and attention as vice president (although not via interviews or impromptu remarks), but once she gained an even wider portfolio as the Democratic presidential nominee, she recoiled from interviews and went into hibernation.

In the last month amid the frenzy of the Biden collapse, her coronation, and the selection of her running mate Tim Walz, a mute Harris has made up all the ground Biden lost as the prior nominee.

She is flooded with hundreds of millions of dollars in left-wing tech and Wall Street cash. All are eager to donate given their money will no longer be wasted on a sore loser but might now earn something in return from a future president.

So, a silent Harris is rising in the polls, once the Biden albatross was cut away and relieved Hollywood/Wall Street/Silicon Valley grandees poured in their riches.

Harris has been instructed to xerox the successful tripartite model of the 2020 Biden victory:

One, keep the incoherent and cackling Harris away from the public and journalists, and ration even her teleprompted and staged speeches.

Two, erase 30 years of left-wing demagoguery and socialist activism. Replace her radical chic with faux-centralism of the ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton sort.

In shameless fashion, Harris is now running ads bragging she will hire more border guards, and secure and stop illegal immigration—this from someone who called for ICE to disappear, championed illegal immigration and an open border, and demonized any who sought to secure it. In some sense, she is even appropriating much of the Trump agenda for the next three months.

So, her message to the public is simply, “Before June 27, I was for what you, the public, hated and never gave a damn about the consequences. And now I am going to fool you for 90 days into thinking I am your real border czar— on the expectation that I can delude you a third time once you naifs elect me and I destroy the border again.”

Three, count on 70 percent of the electorate not voting on Election Day without serious audit.

When will Harris give an unscripted interview? In a month as promised, two months, or after Election Day? When will she dare to speak to a neutral audience? Or mix it up with Donald Trump in no-holds-barred debates? When will she be asked, as incumbent vice president, why she doesn’t begin her promised agenda right now during the last six months of the Biden-Harris tenure?

No such candor will follow until she falls 5 points in the polls behind Trump and is thus forced to speak.

So far now, why would Harris confirm to the electorate that she indeed quickly exhausts her five-hundred-word vocabulary, turns off listeners with adolescent cackling, and is a puerile left-wing ideologue mouthing stale platitudes?

The Trump challenge then is to keep hammering her extremist record, her dangerous agenda for 2025 and beyond, and her weird, indeed historic refusal to mix it up with journalists and to speak ex tempore.

Harris knows that Biden thrived by remaining mute and when he could not, he crashed in the polls. So, she accepts that she too would rather be attacked as evasive, afraid, and cowardly than lose when confirmed as childishly incompetent—given the state media can far more successfully reconstruct her silence as incidental to her mellifluous oratory.

As for the objection that surely Harris cannot pull off such a surreptitious candidacy for 80 more days, Harris would surely answer, “If Biden pulled it off for over three years, I certainly can manage it for 10 weeks.”

Walz

Ostensibly, Tim Walz is a boon to the Trump campaign. His home state Minnesota will likely not be in play in 2024. His strange selection only confirms that Harris is proudly “woke” and a far-left “woke” “radical”—as she herself once put it.

Otherwise, we are learning very quickly that Walz is as erratic, error-prone, and dishonest as Harris. He too is already heading for seclusion from the media. The man of the people from the countryside has scoffed, in self-incriminating Mike Bloomberg fashion, that rural Minnesota is little more than “rocks and cows.”

In mere hours after his nomination, he has grown mute about his past and politics except for teleprompted rah-rah speeches—avoiding reporters, interviews, and unscripted moments.

Why?

Because, in less than a week, the nation learned that Walz lied about his military rank, lied that he had deployed to Iraq, and lied that he had carried a weapon in war. The more we learn about Walz’s record as governor in Minnesota, the more it trumps even the disastrous tenure of Gavin Newsom in his imploding doom-loop state that Walz apparently saw as a model for a once can-do stable Minnesota.

The Insurrectionary Radical Mind

Add it all up, and the president, the vice president, the Democratic presidential candidate, and the vice presidential nominee all either cannot or will not speak casually and publicly to elected representatives, reporters, or the people themselves.

Worse still, they retire from their responsibilities of public engagement because these selected officials accept that the alternative of transparency is nearly suicidal to their own agendas. No one is now in charge of America—neither the ghosted president nor the campaigning vice president candidate who both act as if they hold no office.

It gets far worse still. Joe Biden was created by a soft coup of sorts in March 2000 when all his unpalatable left-wing radical rivals mysteriously vanished in unison at a time when an inert “centrist” Biden had not yet won a single primary.

Then Biden was dethroned abruptly 38 months later by the same inside plotters who deemed his sock puppet role was no longer viable—but only after their sure loser in November had become more a liability to the left than any longer a useful, empty vessel of governance. But as for his fitness as a man of the left to continue ruling us, he was just fine.

It continues to get even worse.

Then the same donors, the same politicos, and the same obsequious media grandees pivoted yet a third time. On the morning of June 27, a fit-as-a-fiddle Biden needed not to step down both because of his brilliance and dynamism—and the unthinkable succession of the Harris mediocrity.

By late night June 27, it was decided that a now suddenly enfeebled and unelectable Biden could be forcibly removed. Harris was Phoenix-like just as quickly reborn as the second coming of Obama—glib, in control, cool, and competent.

We are now witnessing yet a fourth coup from the party that warns us that democracy dies in darkness.

They have removed their once robust now demented nominee, nullified 14 million primary voters, repackaged and selected Harris in his place who has never won a single primary—and now plan to continue in power for another four years by silencing the outgoing president, secluding the vice president and muting the Democratic ticket itself.

In sum, leftists endlessly conspire not only because they have little confidence in the people, but because they have absolutely none in themselves.

A Nightmare for Free Speech

 

A Harris-Walz administration would be a nightmare for free speech

Jonathon Turley, The Hill 

The selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as the running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris has led to intense debates over crime policy, war claims, gender identity policies and other issues.

Some attacks have, in my view, been inaccurate or overwrought. However, the greatest danger from this ticket is neither speculative nor sensational. A Harris-Walz administration would be a nightmare for free speech.

For over three years, the Biden-Harris administration has sustained an unrelenting attack on the freedom of speech, from supporting a massive censorship system (described by a federal court as an “Orwellian Ministry of Truth“) to funding blacklisting operations targeting groups and individuals with opposing views.  

President Biden made censorship a central part of his legacy, even accusing social media companies of “killing people” for failing to increase levels of censorship. Democrats in Congress pushed that agenda by demanding censorship on subjects ranging from climate change to gender identity — even to banking policy — in the name of combatting “disinformation.”

The administration also created offices like the Disinformation Governance Board before it was shut down after public outcry. But it quickly shifted this censorship work to other offices and groups.

As vice president, Harris has long supported these anti-free speech policies. The addition of Walz completes a perfect nightmare for free speech advocates. Walz has shown not only a shocking disregard for free speech values but an equally shocking lack of understanding of the First Amendment.

Walz went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and declared, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

Ironically, this false claim, repeated by many Democrats, constitutes one of the most dangerous forms of disinformation. It is being used to convince a free people to give up some of their freedom with a “nothing to see here” pitch.

In prior testimony before Congress on the censorship system under the Biden administration, I was taken aback when the committee’s ranking Democrat, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), declared, “I hope that [all members] recognize that there is speech that is not constitutionally protected,” and then referenced hate speech as an example.

That false claim has been echoed by others such as Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who is a lawyer. “If you espouse hate,” he said, “…you’re not protected under the First Amendment.” Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean declared the identical position: “Hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.”

Even some dictionaries now espouse this false premise, defining “hate speech” as “Speech not protected by the First Amendment, because it is intended to foster hatred against individuals or groups based on race, religion, gender, sexual preference, place of national origin, or other improper classification.”

The Supreme Court has consistently rejected the claim of Gov. Walz. For example, in the 2016 Matal v. Tam decision, the court stressed that this precise position “strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.'”

As the new Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Walz is running alongside one of the most enthusiastic supporters of censorship and blacklisting systems. 

In her failed 2020 presidential bid, Harris ran on censorship and pledged that her administration “will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy.”

In October 2019, Harris dramatically spoke directly to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, insisting “This is not a matter of free speech….This is a matter of holding corporate America and these Big Tech companies responsible and accountable for what they are facilitating.” She asked voters to join her in the effort. 

They didn’t, but Harris ultimately succeeded in the Biden-Harris administration to an unprecedented degree with a comprehensive federal effort to target and silence individuals and groups on social media.

In my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I detailed how President Biden is the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. Unlike Adams, I have never viewed Biden as the driving force behind the massive censorship and blacklisting operations supported by his subordinates, including Harris. That is not to say that Biden does not share the shame in these measures. He was willing to sacrifice not only free speech but also institutions like the Supreme Court in a desperate effort to rescue his failing nomination.

The substitution of Harris for Biden makes this the second election in which free speech is the key issue for voters. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams, in large part based on his pledge to reverse the anti-free speech policies of the prior administration, including the use of the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest his opponents.

With the addition of Walz, Democrats now have arguably the most anti-free speech ticket of a major party in more than two centuries. Both candidates are committed to using disinformation, misinformation and malinformation as justifications for speech controls. The third category has been emphasized by the Biden-Harris administration, which explained that it is information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

Walz has the advantage in joining this anti-free speech ticket without the burden of knowledge of what is protected under the First Amendment.

With the Harris-Walz ticket, we have come full circle to the very debate at the start of this republic. The warnings of the Founders to reject the siren’s call of censorship remain tragically relevant today. Free speech was and remains our “indispensable right.”

As Benjamin Franklin warned, “In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech….Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man.”

With her selection of Walz, Harris has decided to put free speech on the ballot in this election. It is a debate that our nation should welcome, as it did in 1800.

The Biden-Harris administration has notably toned down its anti-free speech efforts as the election approaches. Leading censorship advocates have also gone mostly silent.

If successful, a Harris-Walz administration is expected to bring back those policies and personalities with a vengeance. That could be radically enhanced if the Democrats take both houses of Congress and once again block investigations into their censorship programs.

The media has worked very hard to present Harris and Walz as the “happy warriors.” Indeed, they may be that and much more. The question is what they are happy about in their war against free speech.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon and Schuster).

Watch out for August!

Watch out for August!

Think July was historic? History says: beware the eighth month.

Tevi Troy, City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/watch-out-for-august

We have just lived through the most volatile, unpredictable, and wild month in the history of presidential politics. In July, we saw a shocking breach in presidential security enabling the near-miss assassination of a former president; his bloody rise from the ground, fist pumping in the air; and a third consecutive convention nomination by his party.

Meantime, establishment forces in government and media flipped their story concerning the health and mental fitness of the incumbent president, leading to an unprecedentedly late change at the top of the ticket. Through a steady barrage of negative headlines and party maneuvering, a president who had spent a half century working in Washington was forced to withdraw so that his party could ignore the results of its own primaries and put forward a younger candidate, launched with an ecstasy unseen (or so we’re told) since Kennedy’s Camelot. Belatedly, the incumbent president addressed the nation to justify his change of heart but wound up explaining little, while demonstrating what everyone already knew.

Whew. That’s a lot.

But could there be more? According to presidential history, August is the month we should really worry about, most especially our incumbent president, who has just implicitly admitted that he is not up to the job. This could be a real problem if August does what it often does—deliver the big, the strange, and the unexpected.

The most dramatic example of this phenomenon, of course, came in 1914, with the arrival of World War I, with what Barbara Tuchman described unforgettably as “The Guns of August.” The United States entered the war in 1917 and lost 116,000 “doughboys” in the fighting.

Another August shock happened in 1923, when President Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack. He was only 57. Vermont congressman Porter Hale tracked down Vice President Calvin Coolidge at his father’s house with the news, and Coolidge’s father (a notary public) swore in the former vice president at 2:47 a.m. using the family Bible.

More recently, the curse of August seems to have accelerated. In August 1965, the Watts riots ignited after Los Angeles police officers tried to arrest 21-year-old Marquette Frye for drunk driving. The riots killed 34 people and cost $40 million in property damage. This was one of the first of the “long, hot summer” riots of the 1960s that plagued President Lyndon Johnson in every summer of his presidency.

Hurricane season in the United States runs from June to November. But for presidents, the worst hurricanes hit in August. In 1969, Hurricane Camille caused the deaths of more than 250 people and $1.4 billion in the Gulf Coast. Richard Nixon was in his first year as president and brought in federal resources, including 16,000 military personnel, to deal with the disaster, He also sent Vice President Spiro Agnew to survey the situation. Agnew’s report led to the recognition of the need for a hurricane severity measure, leading to the Category 1 through 5 scale that we use today.

That scale was in use when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in August of 1992, but it did not help President George H. W. Bush. Bush was seen as slow to respond to the disaster, and the plaintive cry of Dade County emergency operations director Kate Hale—“Where in the hell is the cavalry on this one?”—helped lead to a perception that Bush was not on top of things domestically. He lost his bid for reelection to Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton that November.

Bush’s son George W. was also partially undone by an August hurricane, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. When that storm hit, Bush was on vacation in Texas, and a number of key political and communications staffers were away in Mykonos, Greece, attending communications director Nicolle Wallace’s wedding. The team was not at full strength, and Bush got much of the blame for the disaster, which killed over 1,800 people and caused $148 billion in damages.

August isn’t just a month for natural disasters. Some of the biggest international crises have hit in the eighth month. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bush 41 recovered quickly and formed an international coalition that went on to oust Hussein from Kuwait. The next August, Bush faced another international crisis, as old-guard Soviets unhappy with Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms placed the general secretary under house arrest. When Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft told the president about the coup, Bush complained that U.S. officials were surprised by the development. Scowcroft had the perfect retort: “Yes, so was Gorbachev.”

The final kind of August surprise has been scandal. Neither the Watergate burglary nor the original revelation of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky happened in August, but the denouement of each scandal did. Nixon resigned in August 1974, elevating his unelected vice president Gerald Ford to the presidency. Clinton, faced with DNA evidence of his affair with Lewinsky on her infamous Gap blue dress, finally ended his repeated denials of the affair. He addressed the nation from the Map Room and confessed that “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” Here, for once, August proved a respite. Clinton went to Martha’s Vineyard with his family in an attempt to repair the relationships damaged by his admission.

There likely isn’t an American alive who could imagine a month more tumultuous than this past July for presidential politics. By all rational odds, things will calm down from here. Still, history warns: don’t bet on it.

Presidential historian Tevi Troy is a former White House aide and senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center. He is the author of the forthcoming The Power and the Money: Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry