Quotulatiousness

October 30, 2024

Less than a week of increasingly desperate measures left to go …

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m referring to the antics of the major US political parties as the formal date of the US election heaves into sight. On the one hand, Theophilus Chilton characterizes the Democrats as “cornered animals”:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

With just about a week left before Election Day, things have definitely been heating up. At this point, it’s pretty apparent that all of the indicators are in Trump’s favour — and this is driving the Democrats absolutely nuts (even more than they usually are). A month ago, one could have definitely made the case that Kamala Harris had a good chance of winning. Now, that seems pretty far-fetched outside of the Democrats figuring out a way to fraud the vote so hard that they can overcome their ever-worsening situation in basically every swing state. As we enter this final week, Trump definitely has the momentum and is conducting an upbeat, optimistic campaign. Meanwhile, Kamala and her surrogates seem palpably despondent, screaming at their microphones and rolling out one ill-conceived “October surprise” after another at an increasingly frenetic pace.

That this is the case seems to find a lot of varying data points to support it. Public-facing polling is always subject to a healthy dose of skepticism (“… gonna need to see some internals there, bub”), but even that seems to have moved in the direction of a possible outright Trumpian popular vote victory. It’s obvious where both campaigns’ internal polling is trending, as Trump heads to states like New Mexico and Virginia to expand the slate of contested states while Kamala does damage control in bright Blue urban centres where her party’s early voting numbers have collapsed. Republicans have been overperforming bigly in every swing state’s early voting. Newspapers like the Washington Post and techbros like Jeff Bezos (with access to tons of relevant Big Data) are starting to make nice with Trump because their information is pointing them in that direction. At a demotic level, Trump supporters appear loud and energised in all sorts of places where Trump support has not been traditionally robust, while Kamala’s supporters seem dejected and subdued — when they’re not angrily screaming at small children. On and on, the “non-traditional” indicators keep pointing in the same direction.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious that there is a preference cascade that is moving in Trump’s direction.

Now, if we were dealing with normal people, getting the kind of feedback that an electoral loss like this represents would cause the Left to step back and reassess what they’re doing. They’d take a moment to “look in the mirror”, so to speak. But understand that we are not dealing with normal people. Losing elections (or at least losing the actual voting, the “election” is a different matter altogether) does not send them the same message it sends to everyone else. Instead of introspection, it merely generates anger. It tells them that they need to screech harder, steal harder, and smash harder. After all, these people are on the Right Side of History and anyone who opposes them is a “fascist” and a Nazi (their actual closing argument this week, by the way). And as we all know, heroes like Indiana Jones punch Nazis. If the election is lost, it’s not because the Democrats ran an absolutely clueless, tone-deaf campaign that basically only appealed to wine aunts, gay men, and twenty-something sluts. It’s because Trump is a Russian asset and his supporters accessed a secret reservoir of racism, sexism, and transphobia like it was some kind of evil superpower that allowed them to scurrilously subvert the Good People in America. In other words, the Left will only double down on their own intrinsic madness.

I mean, this isn’t just a theory — we’re already starting to see this pattern of behaviour take place even though Harris hasn’t even lost yet. Celebrities are already starting up with their bidecadal threats to leave the country if their candidate loses. Keith Olbermann wants Elon Musk to be arrested and lose all of his government contracts for the crime of not suppressing oppositional speech on X like it used to be censored back in the old days. The ever-amusing Will Stancil is gloompilling and appears to be on the verge of either suicide or a murder spree. These people are not well. Not at all.

On the other hand, Trump is not only Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin re-incarnated with his red-hatted brownshirts terrorizing the land … he’s literally the Devil:

My current prediction — based on the average of the Trump v Harris opinion polls at Real Clear Politics — is that President Trump will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College in the 2024 election. This prediction is not only based on President Trump now effectively tying with Vice-President Harris in the average of polls, but even more on that VP Harris has never polled as well as Secretary Clinton did at the relevant points in the 2016 campaign.

What reading this Substack Note brought out very clearly was how very different this US Presidential election seems to folk on the two sides of a deeply politically polarised polity.

On the VP Harris side, the salient view is some version of “how can you even consider voting for That Man!?” This is usually attached to a whole list of sins and other claims, of varying accuracy. This is the Trump-The-Devil view. The election is all about Trump and how appalling he is, both as a person and as a political figure. Sure there are other issues (e.g. climate change, abortion) but the lead and focus is how awful Trump is.

To deal with the reality that President Trump has already been President, there is regularly extra focus on his personal Devilness plus various claims about how a second Trump Presidency would be so much worse, for whatever reasons.

Back in the 2016 campaign, it was noted that Trump’s supporters treated what he said seriously but not literally, while his opponents treated his words literally but not seriously. That is, his opponents focused on Trump’s erratic connection to accuracy in his statements but did not take the political pressure points he mobilised anywhere near as seriously. Those were simply ignored and/or dropped into “the bigotry, so ignore” box. Conversely, his supporters were being mobilised by precisely those political pressure points.

The focus on President Trump’s willingness to say things for their rhetorical effect rather than their accuracy loses some of its moral high ground, given how willing President Trump’s opponents have been willing to make statements about him for rhetorical effect, rather than accuracy.

October 25, 2024

The “party of youth” is led by decrepit, doddering wrecks and time-serving political hacks

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You can tell a lot about a political party by looking not at its current leadership but at its “bench” … the next couple of generations of potential leaders. In the United States, the Republicans actually don’t look too bad for future leaders, but the Democrats are facing a bench of already-too-old and never-will-be-ready-for-primetime hacks, as the “groovy fossils” have been clinging on to power right to the bitter end and drive away competent potential successors:

Thirty years ago, Democratic politicians were people you disagreed with, but they were from and of the body of the people. They were us, our brothers and sisters who saw things differently. I lived in California when Jerry Brown was the governor, twice, and I liked him. He was a brilliant crank, colorful and interesting. Whatever else he was, he was never dumb. If you remember the 1992 Democratic primaries — yes, this is a deep reach — the campaign season was full of distinctly likeable people, with the exception of the one who prevailed. Paul Tsongas used to say, often, that he was socially liberal but absolutely certain that federal transfer payments were on an unsustainable trajectory. His best line in the primaries was, “I’m not Santa Claus.” He was an unorthodox Democrat, when it was still possible to be one of those.

The current cultural model of the Democratic Party has produced a generation of politicians who are nakedly stupid and empty.

I’ve compared the Biden years to the Brezhnev years, with the army of handlers covering up the decline of the old party hack who’s been elevated beyond his ability. What we’re seeing now is the generation of dismal, time-serving party hacks that comes after the old decaying party hack. Democrats have credentialed their leaders on their ability to fit themselves tightly to the ritual grooves carved into the discourse. When asked about transgender issues, they say, “Trans women are women”. They have the whole list of correct slogans available for the moments when the machine is expected to push those slogans through the slot. Hate has no home here! (applause) They above all do not say things that are not the slogans. It’s time for the billionaires to pay their fair share!

And so we get Kamala Harris, and holy cow please help me. This may be the first person in the history of the world who has never answered a question. She seems programmed in her core functions to turn away from the actual substance of anything that anyone might ever ask, like she was brainwashed after that one combat patrol that ended vaguely.

[…]

This isn’t an accident. A generation of Democratic politicians have been culturally trained into a deflective and hollow discourse. It’s fascinating to watch them sort JD Vance, who talks like a person, into the category of “weird”.

October 22, 2024

The “Man Enough” ad for the Harris campaign

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo on the amazing political artifact that was the “Man Enough” ad by Kamala Harris supporters trying to persuade men to vote for her:

I wasn’t going to write anything about the “Man Enough” political ad that came out last week, an awkward attempt to woo male voters by a group calling itself Creatives for Harris (a “grassroots collective of ad execs, TV writers, and comedians“). The ad acknowledges a growing gender divide in the U.S. presidential election, especially among younger voters, as feminist belief or lack thereof has become a significant indicator of party affiliation.

By the time I had heard of the ad, there were already dozens of reactions to its bizarre masculine stereotypes and ponderous feminist messaging. It has been called “the Mount Everest of Unintentional Comedy“, “The Most Self-Sabotaging Political Ad Ever” and “an attempt to gain votes by insulting the people it’s courting“. (It also received plaudits from many voters who support Harris.)

Cramming into 90 seconds every feminist cliché of the past two decades about regressive and progressive masculinities, the ad was so cartoonishly overdone as to leave some viewers unsure whether it was a parody or not. How could anyone have thought that undecided male voters would respond positively to an obese chicken farmer boasting about his ability to rebuild carburetors, or a muscular black man telling us that dead-lifting weights doesn’t prevent him from “braiding the sh*t out of my daughter’s hair”.

All of the men in the ad, after first touting their hyper-macho proclivities (for weight-lifting, steak, Bourbon, motorcycles, trucks, hay bales), then assure us that as manly men (“I’m a man, man,” says one), they are more than willing to emote, cry, and — above all — give support to “women who take charge”. I’m surprised we weren’t also told how happy they are to vacuum, and to take submissive postures during sex.

Being pro-woman, according to the ad, means supporting every choice a woman could make, including killing her unborn baby. The ad even comes with an accusatory warning near the end: real men like these are “sick of so-called men domineering, belittling, and controlling women just so they can feel more powerful”.

Statements from the ad’s main creator, Jacob Reed, a comic who has worked for Jimmy Kimmel Live and other productions, proclaimed the ad a genuine attempt to appeal to men, a humorous yet sincere invitation for them to embrace pro-feminist masculinity. Reed mentioned in interview that earlier versions of the ad, which had actually been even more preachy and censorious, with lines like “I’m not afraid of a woman having rights because what kind of creep would I be then?” had been toned down out of respect for male viewers.

“Reed realized the last thing he wanted to do was condescend to his potential audience,” wrote Fast Company author Joe Berkowitz approvingly. “Ultimately, he decided viewers would be savvy enough to intuit the negative implications of the opposing viewpoint without having it spelled out.” How broad-minded of Reed not to spell out the loathsomeness of non-feminist men!

Far from offering a parody of feminist dogma, then, the ad was a straight-up celebration of it.

September 25, 2024

Freddie deBoer on “deference politics”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the first of a series of articles, Freddie deBoer discusses the phenomenon of “deference politics” practiced by many (most?) progressives in the United States (and equally in Canada):

When I talk about deference politics, I’m referring to the tendency of left-leaning people to substitute interpersonal obsequiousness towards “marginalized groups” for the actual material change those groups demand.

If you’ve lived in any left-aligned spaces in the past decade, you’ve encountered deference politics many times. A white person in a humanities seminar, an organizing meeting, an industry convention, a workplace gathering, etc., who makes the conscious decision to avoid engaging or to engage from a position of proactive apology towards various identity groups is engaged in deference politics. Someone who insists that members of “dominant groups” should censor themselves or speak softly or avoid speaking too much or defer to or otherwise “make space” for members of minority identities is advocating for deference politics; someone from a dominant group who tells others in that group that they should defer is practicing (self-aggrandizing) deference politics. “Maybe men should just shut up for awhile,” voiced by a man, is quintessential deference politics. “I sat my white ass down and listened” is deference politics. “Teach me how not to oppress you,” spoken at an academic conference by a straight person to LGBTQ people on a panel, is deference politics. Avoiding sharing a challenging opinion on an issue of controversy for fear of running afoul of the wrong kind of identity accusation is deference politics.

The infamous image above, of Democratic leaders wrapped in kente cloth and taking a knee in memory of George Floyd, actually preceded a meaningful attempt at material change, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. While that bill would not have been a sufficient overhaul of America’s criminal justice system — it’s hard to use the federal government to reform policing, which tends to be governed by state policies and influenced by local conditions — it would have been a good start. The Democrats, sadly, were not able to pass the bill in two tries, though perhaps it could still be revived. That the party simply didn’t have the votes to make the bill law isn’t something that we should be particularly hard on the Democrats about, but the contrast between its failure and the theatrics that attended its announcement is deference politics in its essential form: at a moment of mass discontent over the state of race and policing, Black Americans got the absurd performance from Congressional leaders but not the substance of better policy. And this is core to the critique of deference politics; the point is not that the good intentions of the people who practice them are worthless but that the people who practice deference politics never seem to recognize that all of the deferring never makes positive action more likely. Like many great political crimes, deference politics privileges the communicative and the emotional over the material and the actual.

It’s important to point out that many Black activists and writers recoiled at the deference politics practiced after George Floyd’s death and pointed out that they had never asked for such theatrics.

Is “deference politics” just a way to say “woke”?

No. Deference politics could conceivably be practice or demanded in any given political context and by members of any given political tendency. Conservatives do occasionally advocate for deference politics, such as when they insist that only veterans should comment on issues of war and peace. Nor do woke people assertively practice deference politics all the time; in fact, for various demographic reasons most people practicing social justice politics are themselves members of dominant groups, and they have a tendency to assert their own superior right to speak rather than to defer to others. The term “deference politics” should likewise not be used to refer to all cringey elements of “allyship”, which involves a diverse suite of questionable tactics and attitudes, but certainly deference politics are core to the behavior of the modern ally. The practice epitomizes the modern liberal obsession with defining politics as a matter of interpersonal niceties rather than as the systems through which human values are expressed in material terms in the real world.

September 11, 2024

“You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye”

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Upheaval, N.S. Lyons reviews The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies by Auron MacIntyre:

Even when our nation’s dysfunction becomes too obvious to ignore, average Americans tend to comfort themselves with the story that it at least remains a democratic, constitutional republic. For such Americans, it’s probably been a confusing summer.

One moment the sitting president was, according to the near-universal insistence of mainstream media, sharp as a tack — all evidence to the contrary declared merely dangerous disinformation. The next he was suddenly agreed to be non compos mentis, unceremoniously ousted from the ballot for reelection, and replaced, not in a democratic primary but through the backroom machinations of unelected insiders. Overnight, the same media then converged to aggressively manufacture a simulacrum of sweeping grassroots enthusiasm for that replacement, the historically unpopular Kamala Harris. To call this a palace coup via The New York Times would seem not to stray too far from observable events.

What, some may wonder, just happened to our sacred democracy?

For those on the growing segment of American politics broadly known as the “New Right,” none of this was a surprise. The basic premise of the New Right — whose ranks notably include now-vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance — is that the governance of our country simply doesn’t function as we’re told it does. In fact, the United States has not operated as a constitutional republic for some time now; it is only the façade of one, effectively controlled by an unevictable cadre of rapacious plutocratic elites, corrupt party insiders, unelected bureaucrats, and subservient media apparatchiks — in short, a wholly unaccountable oligarchy.

Among the sharpest recent guides to this argument—and, in my view, to our current broader political moment—is a slim new book by the columnist and influential young New Right thinker Auron MacIntyre, titled The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.

MacIntyre provides a dispassionate dissection of how, without any cabal or specific conspiracy, an elite class captured all our major public and private institutions, hollowed them out, set them all marching in lockstep against the American middle-class, and made a mockery of the notion of constitutional “checks and balances”. The resulting “total state” now operates in increasingly flagrant contradiction to the interests of the American people and democratic government while “wearing the old regime like a skinsuit”.

Essential to understanding this total state is the concept of managerialism, an idea first pioneered by an older generation of political thinkers like James Burnham which has been recovered from relative obscurity and re-employed by the New Right. In this framing, America is today effectively run by a “managerial elite”, which presides over a broader professional managerial class — think college administrators, corporate HR managers, and non-profit activists. Fundamentally, the business of such people is not producing or building anything, providing any essential service, or even making critical leadership decisions, but the manipulation and management — that is, surveillance and control — of people, information, money, and ideas.

The story of the fall of the American republic is the story of the managers’ rise to power everywhere.

In part, this was the inevitable outcome of technological and economic change following the industrial revolution, which made it necessary to expand the ranks of people schooled in managing large, complex organizations. But, as MacIntyre demonstrates, it was also the result of a deeply misguided urge, pioneered by early progressives, to de-risk and “depoliticize” politics by handing over decision-making to technocratic “experts”. The hope was that these experts could rationally and neutrally administer government and society from the top down, through the same principles and processes of “scientific management” first applied to the assembly line.

This proved disastrous.

August 21, 2024

The pro-Kamala coup

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At UnHerd, Edward Luttwak walks through the steps behind the scenes that led to Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate for the 2024 election:

We are stuck with the French phrase coup d’état because nothing else describes so well the sudden removal of an old ruler by secret manoeuvrings — and their replacement with a chosen successor who happens to be endowed with every possible virtue. Of course, Kamala Harris is not a dictator because she must still face a nationwide election. But secret manoeuvrings did make her the presidential candidate of her Democratic Party, a position that is also intended to be filled by primary elections up and down the country before delegates agree on the victor at the Party Convention.

Nor was her vice-presidency enough to secure her candidacy. Far from it, given the unpromising electoral record of that most peculiar office, not inaccurately described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” by John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. In fact, in all of American history, only seven vice presidents were elected to the presidency (eight replaced a dead president). This reflects the habitual role of vice presidents: emphatically not presidents-in-waiting but rather politicos serving as symbolic figures who are selected to attract voters that the president cannot attract with his policies.

[…]

What happened next could not possibly have occurred if there were not a single directing hand behind the scenes. Suddenly, the very same voices from Nancy Pelosi down, who had just told the American people that Biden was fit and ready to win in the upcoming elections and rule for four more years, said the very opposite: that Biden should immediately announce his withdrawal from the elections. Nor is it any mystery who pulled the switch: Barack Obama, the only American President of recent times who has continued to live in Washington DC after leaving the White House — and it is not for the Potomac river-fishing that he has stayed there.

[…]

Obama had definitely not wanted Harris in that position, fearing that she would come under attack for her San Francisco career launched by an older mayor who was also her romantic partner. After Biden had locked himself into his vice-presidential choice of a black woman, Obama proposed his former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. But even the faithful Biden could not accept that: in his own eight vice-presidential years, Biden often tried to influence foreign policy only to be overruled by Obama’s appointees, who knew very much less than he did after his decades of attentive service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And none was more arrogant with him than Rice. And so, even faithful Biden would not accept her, which meant that Obama could ensure Biden’s withdrawal, but not his replacement with his own candidate.

So, what is the party left with? Because Kamala Harris did not win even one primary, and her vice-presidential role was more unremarkable than most, it is possible, just possible, that this week’s gathering will not unfold as a Chinese Communist Party Congress, and one or more delegates will call for a choice. And because there are in fact candidates ready and waiting among the Democratic governors, eight of them women, an open convention need not devolve into chaos or coup — but rather into a democratic election.

August 19, 2024

If you’ve never worked in the private sector, you have no idea how regulations impact businesses

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, J.D. Tuccille explain why Democratic candidates like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have spent little or no time in the non-government world have such rosy views of the benefits of government control with no concept of the costs such control imposes:

The respective public versus private sector experiences of the 2024 Presidential/Vice Presidential candidates.
New York Times

In broad terms, Democrats have faith in government while the GOP is skeptical — though a lot of Republicans are willing to suspend disbelief when their party controls the executive branch.

The contrast between the two parties can be seen in stark terms in the resumes of the two presidential and vice-presidential tickets. The New York Times made it easier to compare them earlier this month when it ran charts of the career timelines of Trump, J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Their roles at any given age were colour-coded for college, military, private sector, public service or politics, federal government and candidate for federal office.

Peach is the colour used by the Times to indicate employment in the private sector, which produces the opportunities and wealth that are mugged away (taxation is theft by another name, after all) to fund all other sectors. It appears under the headings of “businessman” and “television personality” for Trump and as “lawyer and venture capitalist” for Vance. But private-sector peach appears nowhere in the timelines for Harris and Walz. Besides, perhaps, some odd jobs when they were young, neither of the Democrats has worked in the private sector.

Now, not all private-sector jobs are created equal. Some of the Republican presidential candidate’s ventures, like Trump University, have been highly sketchy, as are some of his practices — he’s openly boasted about donating to politicians to gain favours (though try to do business in New York without greasing palms). I’m not sure I’d want The Apprentice on my resume. But there must be some value to working on the receiving end of the various regulations and taxes government officials foist on society rather than spending one’s career brainstorming more rules without ever suffering the consequences.

In 1992, former U.S. senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern penned a column for the Wall Street Journal about the challenges he encountered investing in a hotel after many years in government.

“In retrospect, I … wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day,” he wrote. He bemoaned “federal, state and local rules” passed with seemingly good intentions but little thought to the burdens and costs they imposed.

The lack of private sector stints in the career timelines of Harris and Walz means that, like pre-hotel McGovern, they’ve never had to worry about what it’s like to suffer the policies of a large and intrusive government.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the lessons learned by Republicans and Democrats from their different experiences. Vance, despite having worked to fund and launch businesses, has, since being elected to the U.S. Senate, advocated capturing the regulatory state and repurposing it for political uses, including punishing enemies.

Not only does power corrupt, but it does so quickly.

August 8, 2024

Tulsi Gabbard is reportedly on a US government terrorist watch list

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Publicly demolish the candidate who goes on to become Vice President and then Presidential candidate, get on a terrorist watch list, apparently:

Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard hasn’t exactly been toeing the progressive line since she left the House. In fact, she’s been on a bit of a rampage, destroying the extreme left with every public appearance.

Yet as a former federal lawmaker and a military veteran — one who didn’t leave her unit high and dry as they prepared for deployment, unlike some others I could name — you’d think she’d be someone we wouldn’t suspect of anything illegal.

And I’m willing to bet that no one does suspect her of anything.

That didn’t stop the feds, though.

    In an exclusive breaking story, several Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward with information showing that former U.S. Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is currently enrolled in the Quiet Skies program. Quiet Skies is a TSA surveillance program with its own compartmentalized suspected terrorist watchlist. It is the same program being weaponized against J6 defendants and their families. Quiet Skies is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists. The photo below is a screenshot from the actual Target Package used by the FAMS to surveil Gabbard.

    The whistleblowers first shared the information with Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), a national advocacy group for the Federal Air Marshals (FAMs). According to LaBosco, at least one of the whistleblowers is ready to go on the record with pertinent documentation. LaBosco shared that Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards. LaBosco has attempted to contact Gabbard and her staff but has not received a response.

There’s literally nothing about Gabbard that should warrant this kind of attention. I can think of a few folks where I can at least comprehend an argument for such a thing, but Gabbard is far from one of them.

So what gives?

Matt Taibbi has more:

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection”. The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military’,” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics’. And he said, oh.”

The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled”. Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening”, along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”

It’s not just high profile people like Gabbard who’ve been added to this domestic harassment enhanced security list, it’s apparently anyone deemed to be too closely identified with a current presidential candidate who can be added to these lists:

Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts”, especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat … TSA is out of control against the American people.”

Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset”. After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.

“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”

July 29, 2024

“… those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the increasing, conscious racial segregation of supporters of Kamala Harris, in this case the “Karens for Kamala” Zoom call for white women:

Screencaps from the Zoom call.
Reason magazine.

“Karens for Kamala?” actress Connie Britton joked.

Britton was one of two celebrities, several politicians, and, reportedly, more than 100,000 others on a Zoom call advertised as a way for white women to “show up for Kamala Harris”. What transpired echoed advocacy around Hillary Clinton eight years ago. It was also oddly reminiscent in tone, if not substance, of missteps we’ve seen from conservatives like Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), in which those who aren’t on board with your side are assumed to simply be deficient human beings.

Also, pop star Pink was there. And Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) told a story about her and Britton having to drink toad venom after eating bad seafood.

The virtual gathering was organized by gun control activist and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, who modeled the meeting after recent calls set up by and for black women and black men who want Harris for president.

According to Elizabeth Minnella, who served as a sort of master of ceremonies of the call, more than $1.8 million was raised last night. Urging viewers to group chat their friends with a fundraising link, Minnella said she would be dropping it into her favorite group chat, titled “Witches for Harris”.

“I am here tonight, embracing myself in your incredible, profound white women midst, because we’ve got a fucking job to do, y’all,” said Britton, who has starred in shows like Nashville, American Horror Story, and The White Lotus. She went on to suggest that because Vice President Kamala Harris is a woman, she will “listen. And lead with empathy, integrity, and the power of the truth”. When President Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee and endorsed Harris to take his place, “the world blew up. Did you feel it?” asked Britton. “It was seismic. Cosmic, even. And since then — have you seen it? Have you seen Kamala glisten in the brilliance and shine of her true power and leadership? And what does that feel like? Feels like self-love.”

“Women, when we are capable of opening up to our own voices and gifts, can access a love of self that is reflective … and can shine outward to unknown depths,” Britton continued. “Which brings me back to us. Beautiful, beautiful white women. Here we are gathered together.”

If Britton sounds a bit gender essentialist, a bit patronizing, a bit woo-woo — well, that was just in keeping with the overall vibes of the call. At least Britton’s “Karens for Kamala” joke was one of the few moments in which speakers weren’t positively radiating self-seriousness.

If there was an underlying theme, it was that white women needed to use their privilege to elect Harris — or else.

“White women, we have 100 days to help save the world!” Watts said.

July 27, 2024

More Kamalamentum

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Spiked, Fraser Myers examines what he calls “Kamala’s Ministry of Truth”:

“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Did I just fall out of a coconut tree? How else to explain the dizziness so many of us are feeling at the speed of Kamala Harris’s coronation – and at the contortions now being performed to present her as the saviour of the beleaguered Democrats, if not of American democracy itself.

Within 48 hours of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race on Sunday, Vice-President Harris had clinched enough delegates, donors and Democratic power-brokers to ensure her an unchallenged, uncontested path to becoming the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump this autumn. The last dominos to fall, Barack and Michelle Obama, today offered a full-throated endorsement of Harris, claiming she has the “vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands”.

Since Harris emerged as the frontrunner, the Democrats’ media cheerleaders appear to have been gripped by a nasty bout of Kamalamania. “Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States. Democracy will survive”, declared one Hollywood celeb. She brings the “political power of joy” and “effervescent vibes” to US politics, according to a New York Times columnist. CNN reporters have been gushing over her choice of hoodie and sneakers. As Jenny Holland wrote on spiked earlier this week, the media are eager to present Harris as “Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all rolled into one”.

We need to remember who we’re talking about here. The newly anointed Democratic nominee was someone few believed could win the presidency, only a few weeks ago. Indeed, this is widely understood to be behind the Obamas’ hesitancy to back her – and Biden’s own reluctance to hand over the baton to his veep.

It’s not hard to see why. Harris is a politician who exudes negative charisma. She speaks like a cross between a Calfornian self-help guru – her favoured aphorism is “What can be, unburdened by what has been” – and a primary-school teacher who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine at lunchtime. She laughs and cackles at inopportune moments, often to herself. At times, her speech is as incoherent as the mentally frail Joe Biden’s. Who could forget her nonsensical remarks last year at a White House function in which she asked: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Good luck translating that into English for swing voters in Pennsylvania.

We know that Harris is unpopular with the public, because she has been tested before. Her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 had to be suspended two months before the first primary vote in order to avoid total humiliation at the ballot box. Nationally, Harris was polling at just three per cent. Even in her home state of California, she could only muster eight per cent. Yet now she is about to become the Democratic contender for the White House, with zero input from the public or the party grassroots.

At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a few questions from readers about the Kamala Harris candidacy and what it might indicate about what is happening behind the scenes among the Democratic movers and shakers:

My read is that 2024 is going to be Fortified to hell and back — that’s a certainty — but the extent of the Fortification, and probably its eventual outcome, is tied to the Robber Barons. I agree with William Briggs or whoever it is who suggests a “Thermidorian faction” (I prefer “competent fraction”) of Juggs within the Apparat who are trying desperately to slam on the brakes. IF they can do it — and I’m honestly not sure they can, not at this late date — it’ll be because the Robber Barons put the resources behind it.

I get a sense that there are more than a few Robber Barons making their peace with the BOM. There are, of course, a lot more Robber Barons who hate him and will never reconcile themselves to him … but that doesn’t mean they want Kamala Harris as President. As I wrote in the comments yesterday, if they’d wanted Harris as President, she’d be President by now. Pretty much all the Uniparty’s current problems go away if Biden resigns the Presidency, and if they can force him to drop his reelection bid, they can certainly force his resignation — he’s out in five months no matter what, so why not pass the reins to Harris? She’d be in a far, far stronger position going into 2024 as the incumbent.

No, really. I know that sounds badly wrong to people in contact with Reality, but look at it from the dumbass perspective. The Media has been telling us for four years that the Biden Administration is the greatest ever. Despite your lying eyes, there’s no inflation, no border crisis, no crime problem, and so forth. Harris is going to try to take credit for that on the campaign trail, of course, but it rings a weensy bit hollow coming from a Vice-President. From Madam President xzyrzelf, though? Different story. At least, that’s how the dumbfucks out there in Normie-land would see it, and those are the stupid bastards who will be voting in the fall.

As Vice-President, she gets no credit for the Biden Administration’s accomplishments (I know, I know, stop laughing) … but she gets tarred with all their failures, plus her fuckups as “border czar” (that’s gonna be fun), plus her role in the very obvious and ongoing coverup of Dementia Joe’s galloping dementia.

Make her President, and all that shit goes away. For her first official act, she appoints someone, anyone, as the new “border czar”, and tells that persyn to fall on xzheyr sword. Or, better yet, just never mention the border again. Tell the Media to blast nothing but Historic First Female President!! shit from now until Fortification Day. They will be happy to comply, and it’ll drive most of the bad news off the front page.

This is such a no-brainer that there are only two possible explanations for why they haven’t done it: Either they’re even more terrifyingly stupid than they seem, and so it never occurred to them; or it did occur to them, but Kamala Harris is such a repulsive retard that they can’t risk it — despite it all, Chomo Joe and his galloping dementia are still, somehow, the safer bet.

My guess is that, as Pickle Rick posited the other day, they all give her a pro-forma endorsement, then quietly pull the funding plug. They all pretty much have to endorse her at this point, if for no other reason than the Spiteful Mutants are already going to go apeshit in Chicago; an actual primary fight might burn the city to the ground.

But who knows? These are Juggs. Plus, as I’ve written, this is their moment — every grievance group in AINO will be going for it, as the Uniparty in general, and Harris in particular, will have to promise them the earth and stars to keep them onside. Consider that she has to get both the Bagels and their shekels, and the Pali-bros, in order to make the whole thing go. That would test the political skill of a Metternich, to say nothing of a woman who literally slept her way to the top. She can’t blow ’em all, so she’s going to have to deliver the goods in some other way.

It’ll be a hoot, that’s for sure. Keeping an eye on the funding is probably the best indicator we have.

And in an answer to a different reader:

Welcome to Late Soviet America. Expect a lot more of this, as obvious, ham-handed repression is SOP for flailing, collapsing regimes. We’ve entered the Andropov / Chernenko phase of the festivities, when the phrase “decrepit old man” refers to both the “leader” and his nation. And yeah, I realize that makes Kamala Harris the fake and gay Gorbachev, but that’s actually pretty close — Gorby, too, destroyed what was left of his country because he really believed in all that “openness” and “democracy” bullshit they taught him at the Higher Party Academies. Harris is a far worse moonbat race-baiter than even Bathhouse Barry ever dreamed of being; we’ll get the whole Gorby-Yeltsin-we’re fucked decade in about six weeks once she’s Fortified into office.

And on the power politics uncertainties for both America’s allies and adversaries when it’s not clear exactly who is in charge in Washington DC, the temptation to press a temporary advantage may become overwhelming:

Had Brandon resigned, it wouldn’t be ideal for the Juggs — Harris is still largely holding the bag for Chomo’s failures — but it’d be a hell of a lot better than this, because at least there is someone nominally in charge. Putin or Xi or whoever can pick up the phone and demand to speak to President Harris, and at the very least, he can be assured that President Harris will remember their discussion a few hours later. She might decide to do some incredibly stupid shit, of course — in fact that’s almost guaranteed — but at least Xi, Putin, whoever will know that it’s a bad decision …

… and not just some random drooling lunacy by a guy who thinks it’s 1971 and he’s sticking it to Corn Pop. If anything, the problem just got worse, because they’ve all but openly admitted what everybody already knew: We’re under the Do Long Bridge. There ain’t no fuckin’ CO. But now, instead of just ignoring Harris as per usual when decisions have to be made by … well, by whomever, now they pretty much have to loop her stupid ass in, even though she has no official power to make anything happen. They’ve added yet another layer of retarded dysfunction to an already FUBAR process.

And at The Free Press, Suzy Weiss explains a few Kamalamemes that her campaign has decided to “lean into” (note that the rest is behind a paywall):

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way — and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant — that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—”You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool”.

→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-Eleven. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story”. The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.

Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.

July 22, 2024

Kamalamentum

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Sunday, Joe Biden announced that he won’t be seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination after all and that he supported Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s best chance to win in November. Mark Steyn comments:

So Biden gets served the Ultimate Anyway, and we are now supposed to get excited about which white-male governors in the Democrat Party are willing to challenge the first female … first black … first “Asian-American” … first Montreal schoolgirl … first Canadian since Chester Arthur to be nominated for president.

Oh, no, wait — he wasn’t nominated; he succeeded after the incumbent was assassinated. Hmm.

If anyone thinks this is the last plot twist, you’re forgetting we’re in the final seasons of Dynasty here — the Fallon-abducted-by-space-aliens Moldavian-massacre phase.

[…]

There are a lot of voters who like the Higher Bollocks Kamala can slough off so effortlessly. The stuff about working together to understand where we are can, in the right hands, be an appealing simulacrum of profundity. Particularly when sluiced through the court eunuchs of the Washington press corps — the same guys who’ve been telling us these last couple of weeks that the Democrat bigshots are at war with each other and have no consensus on the way forward, rather than merely doing a bit of dime-store melodrama while implementing the plan predicted way back at the dawn of the Biden Era by Diane Calabrese.

There seems to be a lot of coordinating for a Sunday afternoon. The Clintons have already endorsed Kamala, and the Biden campaign finance chair has already moved on:

    Please give what you can today (money given here will be used 100% to elect Kamala Harris President).

And, just to put this in a global context, Joe’s farewell message sounded a lot to me like a demented version of Liz Truss, British prime minister for twenty minutes. You can’t tell the palace coups without a scorecard: Liz, weeks after winning the Tory leadership, was taken out by “the markets”; Biden, weeks after winning the Democrat nomination, was taken out by the donors (“No more dough until no more Joe“). There’s a lot of it about, don’t you think? You’d almost get the impression “elections” are just boob bait for the rubes …

Still, let us shed a tear for the latest guy to be written out of the soap. It’s only a few weeks since MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough was hailing the alleged commander-in-chief as “intellectually, analytically … the best Biden ever“. Then, tragically, the analytical genius came down with Sudden Overnight Dementia Syndrome. Because that’s the world we live in: Long Covid, drive-thru dementia.

Biden now assures us that he’s going to finish his term — which would be a novelty as, in terms of putting in a full day’s work, he’s never really started it. But we shall see. I’ve said before that it would be greatly to Kamala’s advantage to run as the incumbent.

That’s still the way to bet.

July 11, 2024

On immigration, progressives are following Brecht’s advice to “dissolve the people and elect another”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the US, Canada, Britain, and most of western Europe the tide of immigration (legal and illegal) never seems to ebb, despite clear indications from the electorates that they’ve had enough. But perhaps progressives in each country are merely taking Bertolt Brecht’s advice for times when the people have forfeited the government’s confidence:

The problem extends far, far beyond merely glutting the labor market and lowering our wage scale, however. See, I’ve explained above why many Republicans go along with the Amnesty Express. But what about the Democrats? What’s in it for them, especially since Big Labor – whose members stand to lose a great deal because of the depression of wage levels – makes up such a prominent part of the Democrat coalition?

What the Democrats stand to win is permanent political power.

See, unlike previous waves of immigration, we are making no effort whatsoever to assimilate current immigrants to our culture and society. Instead, immigrants tend to cluster in indigestible lumps, maintaining their own cultures, languages, and ways from “the old country”. This is doubly true of illegal immigrants, who have managed to turn large swathes of many of our cities into small-scale replicas of Mexico and Morocco. This is even more troublesome because practically all of these immigrants come from places whose histories and traditions are grossly incompatible with our own. These folks don’t know about the idea of protecting life, liberty, and property through a rule of law system, so consequently they don’t CARE about such a system. They’re just here to get jobs or get welfare, for the most part.

In essence, when you import millions of people from socialistic and/or primitive Global South countries, you will end up with a socialistic, primitive Global South country of your own. And that’s what the Democrats are counting on. This is essentially what has been happening with the millions of people coming across our southern border from all over the world.

If the Democrats can get all of the 30-60 million illegals in America amnestied so that they can stay here and start their “path to citizenship”, and can bring in millions more through the various visa processes, then the Democrats are setting themselves up to be able to gain total control in about two decades – which is how long it will take for the children of all these immigrants to join the pool of voters with their parents. Further, they don’t seem to even want to have to wait that long, considering how they are opposing a bill currently before the Congress that would crack down on voting by illegal immigrants. Essentially, the Democrats – who have been unable to convince the current set of American voters to consistently elect them – want to replace us with a new set of voters, one which will vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats every election, up until we reach the point where there aren’t any more elections.

This is why I say that immigration is more important even than abortion or these other issues that people on the Right are so concerned about. Think about it. With 100 million newly-minted Democrat voters, the Democrats will be able to gain permanent control of all branches of government, at all levels, in nearly all of the states. What that means is that they will get to push through their policies at will. That means no more pro-life restrictions on infanticide. No more gun rights. No more religious liberty. No more rollback of the gay agenda. No more tax cuts or spending rollbacks. No more economic liberty. Kiss private property goodbye. THAT’S what the Democrats want – and the only way for them to get it to convince enough idiots in this country to give it to them via immigration, both legal and illegal.

So while conservatives are clawing each other’s eyes out because one candidate or the other isn’t as pro-life as they want them to be, the Democrats are setting up the playing field to replace the current American electorate with a new one from the Third World, complete with all the third world values of corruption and socialism that come with them.

Of course, for “Democrats”, read “Liberals” in Canada, “Labour” in the UK, and so on. The party labels change, but the basic beliefs are remarkably consistent across the western world (and Rishi Sunak’s just-ousted Conservatives were just as committed to open borders and mass immigration as Keir Starmer’s new Labour government).

July 8, 2024

“See, Trump’s plan is … Christofascist ethnic cleansing. It’s all so obvious now, isn’t it?”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray finds the stupid so painful that it hurts:

I was worried, a year ago, about an election-year decline into hysteria and evil. What I didn’t see was the descent into grinding moronization.

“They want to dismantle the administrative state and give more power to the executive branch.” I … can’t. I just can’t. It’s like somebody made a special kind of rice cereal for infants that replaces the rice with shit. It’s sewage gruel for toothless adult babies. It’s like saying “they want to take power away from judges and transfer it to the judicial branch”, but that doesn’t really begin to do justice to the stupidity of these statements.

Similarly, this segment on MSNBC warns that Trump is planning to “bring the agencies under the umbrella of the executive branch”.

Imagine living in a world where the Department of Commerce was part of the executive branch. And on and on and on. […]

See, Trump’s plan is … Christofascist ethnic cleansing. It’s all so obvious now, isn’t it?

June 29, 2024

“No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Joe Biden’s performance in the first Presidential debate on Thursday night was so bad that even his strongest supporters in the media have turned on a dime and are now contemplating his replacement:

This is not a hard column to write. In fact, I wrote it twice already! But last night’s debate performance by Joe Biden is the end of his campaign. It’s over. Done. No sane person can possibly believe that this man is capable of being president now, let alone for another four years. No sane person can vote for him.

And watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.

The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?

And if they have not told him the truth on this, what else are they afraid to tell him?

The mainstream media also bears responsibility for once again being an arm of the DNC establishment, running countless stories about Biden’s acuity and sharpness from inside sources, while attacking the few journalists who actually dared write the most obvious truth about this election: Biden has deteriorated rapidly in the last four years, he is unrecognizable from the man who ran in 2020, and we’ll be lucky if he is able to function as president for the next six months, let alone four years.

I watched MSNBC after the debate. It was like watching State TV in Russia. It took them an hour to acknowledge what the world had just seen, as they danced pathetically around what was staring them in the face. They are literally administration spokespeople — Jen Psaki has the exact same job she always had — waiting for instructions on what to say out loud. And they have all lied through their teeth for months about Biden’s fitness, only to refuse any accountability. Joe Scarborough recently declared on his show:

    Start the tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth: and F— you if you cannot handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever.

To which the only response is: No, F— you, Mr Scarborough. And fuck all the lies you have told.

But there is a huge, gleaming, hopeful silver lining, as I’ve noted many times before. For the first time this year, we have a chance of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office with a new nominee from a younger generation. No, I don’t know who — except it obviously cannot be Kamala Harris, who would lose by an even bigger margin than the ambling cadaver. But that is what politics is for! There is time for a campaign before a convention that could now be must-see television. A future campaign already has a simple message that vibes with the moment and instantly puts Trump on defense: it’s time for the next generation to lead. We are choosing between the past (Trump) and the future, between the old and the young, between the insane versus the coherent.

All it takes is a credible Democrat of stature to say they are running against Biden. Then all the bets are off. He or she need not criticize Biden, and, in fact, should lionize his service. But they can say they’re running because beating Trump is the first and most important objective, and, at this point, it is obvious that Biden simply cannot beat Trump.

Does anyone have that courage? The person who shows it will instantly become the front-runner. Go for it.

In The Free Press, Bari Weiss points the finger at all of the American media and the apparatchiks of the Biden administration who have been loudly and consistently proclaiming that Biden was in great mental shape, running rings around his advisors, and fit, rested and ready to debate Trump:

Rarely are so many lies dispelled in a single moment. Rarely are so many people exposed as liars and sycophants. Last night’s debate was a watershed on both counts.

The debate was not just a catastrophe for President Biden. And boy—oy—was it ever.

But it was more than that. It was a catastrophe for an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits, who have, since 2020, insisted that Biden was sharp as a tack, on top of his game, basically doing handstands while peppering his staff with tough questions about care for migrant children and aid to Ukraine.

Anyone who committed the sin of using their own eyes on the 46th president was accused, variously, of being Trumpers; MAGA cult members who don’t want American democracy to survive; ageists; or just dummies easily duped by “disinformation”, “misinformation”, “fake news”, and, most recently, “cheapfakes”.

Cast your mind back to February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, came out with his report that included details about Biden’s health, which explained why he would not prosecute the president.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Can anyone doubt that characterization after watching Biden’s debate performance?

Yet Eric Holder told us that Hur’s remarks were “gratuitous”. The former attorney general tweeted: “Had this report been subject to a normal DOJ review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised”. Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama adviser, said Hur’s report was a “partisan hit job”. Vice President Kamala Harris argued: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts, and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous”. The report does not “live in reality”, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, stressing that the president was “sharp” and “on top of things”.

June 27, 2024

California’s Trudeau

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power by Ellie Gardey Holmes, a biography of California’s own Justin Trudeau:

I’ve been appalled by Gavin Newsom for years, but to read Ellie Gardey Holmes’s powerful and unflinching new book Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power is to find one’s contempt for this hideous creature skyrocketing. If he has any redeeming qualities, any special gifts, any attributes that might illuminate an admirable and recognizably human side, there’s no sign of them here. This is a man who, despite having no discernible talent for governance or anything else, was lucky enough to be born into one well-off family – his great-grandfather co-founded the Bank of Italy, which later became the Bank of America – and to be, from earliest childhood, a sort of honorary member of an even richer family, the Gettys, his father being best friends with oil magnate Gordon Getty, who was like a second father to young Gavin.

Both men, his biological father and his second father, used their considerable influence from the beginning to help Gavin rise to power. Indeed, as surely as any Kennedy or Bush, Gavin Newsom was born into a political machine and bred to be a politician. After he and Getty played a big role in helping Willie Brown to get elected mayor of San Francisco, Brown named Newsom to the city’s Parking and Traffic Commission. Soon he was promoted to the Board of Supervisors, a post he held from 1997 to 2004. “Because of his lack of qualifications,” writes Gardey Holmes, “Newsom entered office entirely indebted to Willie Brown”. Observers referred to him, in fact, as “an appendage of Willie Brown”. Quick sidebar in the midst of this tale of political advancement: when his mother was dying, Gavin was pretty much AWOL, although he was present when she underwent assisted suicide – which, at the time, was illegal in California. Others had been prosecuted for their participation in such actions; Gavin was not, a foreshadowing of many other occasions on which he would be treated as exempt from the rules governing the behavior of ordinary mortals.

In 2003 he was elected mayor. One of his first acts was to authorize the issuing of marriage licenses for same-sex couples, even though he had no power to do any such thing. He even performed some of the marriages himself. This cynical move (which even California’s two Democratic Senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, opposed) was a cheap stunt, carried out at the expense of gullible gays, whose marriages were soon enough ruled invalid by the state Supreme Court – but it had the desired effect. It made him a national figure and it won him the esteem of the mainstream media. Bob Simon told him on 60 Minutes that he might well have “set a record for instant fame in this country”.

From the beginning of his life in “public service” – that laughable term – Newsom’s vanity and ambition were flagrantly palpable. Although the New York Times described him during his mayoralty as the subject of “local adoration”, some San Francisco insiders resented his brazen focus “on self-aggrandizement and personal publicity” and his relative indifference to the city’s growing problems on a variety of fronts. Routinely, he stole credit for other people’s initiatives and acted as if he were exempt from the rules. A police officer drove him to his wedding in Montana in his official SUV – a definite no-no.

After two terms as mayor he had his eye, naturally, on the Governor’s Mansion – but polls convinced him to run for Lieutenant Governor instead. He spent two terms in that job, too, but hated it: he had no real power, no real staff, no real budget, and he felt disrespected by his boss, Jerry Brown. The initiatives he did support were destructive “progressive” bilge of the first water: for example, he was the only statewide elected official to support Proposition 47, which converted many felonies to misdemeanors, helping to set off the still ongoing rash of shoplifting that has made San Francisco, particularly, an international joke. For the most part, however, instead of addressing the state’s problems he put his energies into enhancing his national profile. He became a fixture on shows like Real Time with Bill Maher. He also wrote – or at least signed his name to – a book calling for the transformation of government by means of “digital technology”; the book’s argument didn’t make much sense, and even Stephen Colbert, usually a reliable left-wing shill, dismissed it as “bullshit”.

And then, inevitably, in 2019, Newsom became governor, thanks in no small part to massive donations from the Gettys and Pritzkers and his role as “the darling of the upper class”. California was already on the skids, but Newsom accelerated the process. He pulled National Guard troops from the southern border, saying that “[t]he border ’emergency’ is a manufactured crisis and California will not be part of this political theater”. He even had the state sue President Trump over his border emergency declaration, which according to Newsom was nothing but an expression of “division, xenophobia, [and] racism”. Instead of canceling one of the state’s notorious boondoggles – the program to build a staggeringly expensive high-speed rail line from San Francisco to San Diego – he shortened the planned route, so that the trains would run only between Merced and Bakersfield. This made the rail line an even more ridiculous proposition, but Newsom’s priority was not to provide a useful means of public transportation but to keep the state from having to return the federal money appropriated for the project to a government run by Donald Trump, who from the beginning of his governorship Newsom singled out as his personal enemy – an action that profoundly enhanced his popularity among California Democrats. Indeed, instead of seriously dealing with California’s jobs and education crises, Newsom focused relentlessly on attacking Trump. A hundred days into his governorship, he bragged childishly that California was “the most un-Trump state”.

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