RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/15/on-truth-and-lie-in-an-extramoral-sense/

Students of Friedrich Nietzsche, or those who consort with such dubious people, will recognize the source of my title. It is the English version of the title Nietzsche employed for his early, unfinished essay Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne (1873).

The essay made a splash among pampered graduate students who endeavored to relieve the boredom of their humdrum lives with dreams of derring-do. Consider the essay’s opening:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.

Cozy, armchair nihilists just love that sort of thing.  They repeat such slogans to themselves while primping before first dates, seldom wondering why there never seems to be a second.

Cosmological angst was not Nietzsche’s only sweetmeat on offer in this essay, though. Even more popular were his epistemological-moral musings.  This is the key passage:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

In short, says Nietzsche, “to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.” From a moral perspective, he concludes, “to tell the truth” is “the duty to lie according to a fixed convention.”

Such observations are like catnip to aspiring relativists. Who knew that Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States, was a deacon in this church of cosmic futility?

Well, I am not sure that Harris herself is a paid-up member of this cynical coven. But her stage managers and stunt doubles certainly are.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/there_s_allegedly_an_affidavit_claiming_abc_gave_kamala_the_questions_before_the_debate.html

One of the things that was obvious during the debate was that Kamala came in with a lot of memorized material. Those who like her were impressed by how well-prepared she was. Those who don’t like her noted that she had to memorize everything because she is incapable of answering substantive questions on the fly—and that her memorized answers were platitudes, canned phrases, and blatant lies. What didn’t occur to those of us who dislike Kamala was that the memorized lines invariably went right to the heart of the questions. Weird, huh?

That perfect alignment of prepared material and questions could, of course, have come about because it was fairly obvious what the moderators would ask. After all, we knew that they would frame the questions to support Kamala and hurt Trump. However, we believed that, after the scandal of Donna Brazile giving Hillary the debate questions in 2016, there was no way that the Democrats would try that cheat again.

It turns out that we might have been a bit naïve.

An X poster named “Black Insurrectionist” (aka @DocNetyoutube) claims to possess an affidavit from an ABC employee exposing ABC for having given Kamala the questions in advance and promising her that the moderators would never attack her but, instead, that they would only attack Trump:

I will be releasing an affidavit from an ABC whistleblower regarding the debate. I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower. The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked. Accordingly, the affidavit states several other factors that were built into the debate to give Kamala a significant advantage. I have seen and read the affidavit and after the attorney blacks out the name of the whistleblower and other information that could dox the whistleblower, I will release the full affidavit.  I will be releasing the affidavit before the weekend is out.

In a later exchange, Black Insurrectionist implied that the same whistleblower wrote that Kamala’s campaign actually helped draft the questions:

As of now, we have only a promise. However, given the moderators’ disgraceful behavior, the Democrats’ past practice of cheating in debates, and Kamala’s surprisingly on-point debate preparation, it’s not unreasonable to believe that Black Insurrectionist will make good on his promise.

https://www.nysun.com/article/will-kamala-harris-ever-explain-any-of-her-extraordinary-policy-flip-flops
So we’ve been through an entire debate, and Vice President Harris hasn’t explained any of her extraordinary policy flip-flops.

I’m sorry, a person can’t just wake up one morning and abandon their entire worldview without an explanation. I mean, they can try, but no sensible person would take them seriously. Sure, politicians have been calibrating and triangulating their positions since Pericles.

Most have been compelled to explain their ideological evolution — or have the decency to lie about it. None has ever relied on an army of anonymous campaign flacks to erase a lifetime of positions.

Well, not until Ms. Harris.

We all understand Democrats are desperate to shield voters from their candidate’s mind-numbing tautological rhetoric. Who can blame them, right? “Kamala Harris” is an empty vessel to be filled with the aspirations and dreams of gullible partisans. And allowing her to speak extemporaneously in public would kill all the joy, quicky.

These swirling platitudes and nervous laugh, however, don’t suggest that Ms. Harris isn’t bright. They suggest that she has no genuine philosophical or ethical belief system — other than, perhaps, obtaining and using power. Indeed, there’s little chance she will coherently expound on her sudden policy U-turns because they make zero ideological sense.

Let’s remember that Ms. Harris hasn’t merely been tinkering with the top marginal tax rate in her economic plan. She’s on the record championing, often quite passionately and definitively, a bunch of completely harebrained extremism.

“Will you fully endorse the Green New Deal tonight?” an Iowa voter asked Ms. Harris in 2019.

Yes, she answered. Fully.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/what-would-make-the-perfect-democratic-candidate/

Kamala Harris happens to possess none of the requisite characteristics.

Imagine an American time traveler from a century ago showing up unannounced in 2024. After he spends a few days marveling at the giant, rotating logs of meat that Greek restaurants use to make gyros, you tell him there’s a presidential election going on and that the Republican candidate incited a violent attempt to overturn the results of the previous election — oh and he’s also a convicted felon.

“Well, I guess the election is over, why even bother with the voting?” he asks.

“No, it’s actually a tie,” you respond, as he gives you a confused look similar to the one he directed at the sweaty, spinning meat.

Of course, in order to win a presidential election, a candidate doesn’t have to be ethical or even felony-free. He or she simply has to be one electoral vote better than the other person. And if the other party can’t field a plausible candidate, it’s not like both lose. The least worst one wins the nation’s grandest prize.

That is how, in 2016, Donald Trump ended up beating Hillary Clinton, perhaps the only candidate less likeable than he is. And a lack of likeability in the Democratic candidate is why, despite his significant shortcomings, the former president is now tied with the current vice president.

As if shopping for candidates at an outlet mall, Democrats for the last three elections have pulled their nominees off the “irregular” pile. All their candidates had significant flaws: Clinton was picked because she was seen as the heir apparent after Democratic primary voters passed her by in 2008. In 2020, elderly Joe Biden won the nomination because panicked Democrats saw the unelectable Bernie Sanders racing toward the nomination. And in 2024, unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris wrested away the nomination because panicked Democrats saw Joe Biden racing toward cognitive decline and thus certain defeat.

But imagine there was a universe in which Democrats could start fresh and pick the perfect candidate. Say there was no existing infrastructure that favored incumbents and insiders, and progressives were instead free to choose whoever they thought gave them the best chance to win. What would that perfect candidate look like?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-crime-numbers-dont-help-david-muirs-assertion/

In the debate Tuesday:

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.

DAVID MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, but Vice President the…

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: use me, the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.

There are new updated numbers from the National Crime Victimization Survey released this week. The NCVS is a useful tool, because while the more widely discussed FBI crime figures can only count crimes reported to the police, the NCVS surveys a large sample of Americans — around 240,000 people — and extrapolates from that. Some crimes, like murder, are almost always reported to the police, but other crimes, like assault, aren’t always going to be reported, for a variety of reasons.

Overall, the NCVS indicate that in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 rate of 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.

Ironically, the NCVS had lower numbers for violent victimizations for 2020 and 2021, despite the widespread perception that crime got significantly worse during the pandemic. In 2018 the figure was 23.8, in 2019 it was 21, it was 16.4 in 2020 — remember, lots of people were stuck at home, and fewer people on the street means less street crime — and in 2021 it was 16.5.

We can argue whether going from 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons to 22.5 violent victimizations is enough of a decline to argue, as Muir asserted, that “overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” But we can all agree that it’s not much of a decline. And note property crimes are up very slightly, from 101.9 incidents per 1,000 households to 102.2.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/the_american_horatius.html

Donald Trump has been in America’s headlights for decades.  By now, we know he’s impulsive, brash, boastful, proud, successful, charismatic, irreverent, and retaliatory.  We also know he’s foresightful, confident, bright, obstinate, entertaining, self-assertive, tenacious, and independent.  This admixture of characteristics couldn’t be more useful in our zeitgeist. 

What isn’t Trump?  He isn’t a utopian.  He isn’t anti-Caucasian.  He isn’t a secularist.  He isn’t unpatriotic.  He isn’t anti-populist.  He isn’t a globalist.  He isn’t a socialist.  He isn’t an ideologue.  He isn’t anti-tradition.  He isn’t anti-police.  He isn’t anti-family.  He isn’t anti-nation-state.  He isn’t a progressive.  He isn’t a deep-statist.  He isn’t anti-heteronormative.  He isn’t an insurrectionist.  He isn’t a vegetarian.  And he isn’t perfect.  

Trump’s natural metapolitical vibe is a spanner in the works of the administrative state, that oligarchy of scalawag bureaucrats and experts who believe themselves entitled to play with America’s past, present, and future.  Trump is a force unto himself, and for that, the left and their media allies ceaselessly malign him, claiming he’s a demagogue, an authoritarian, a threat to democracy.  Humbug!  There’s no greater threat to America than progressive Democrats and their “transformative” ideology.

Trump represents a nascent centripetal power engaged in the necessary and long overdue contraction of leftist ideologies and programs.  He possesses an authentic ineluctable resistance to prevailing postmodern delusions.  Such a person cannot avoid becoming the bête noire, the Nosferatu of the American left. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/you-hate-trump/

A great many Americans claim that they cannot vote for former President Donald Trump because they loathe him.

That was also their argument in 2016 and 2020.

That argument was childish in 2016 and 2020, and it remains childish in 2024.

I say “childish” because mature people don’t vote on the basis of whom they like. They vote on the basis of which candidate is best for their country. As I asked both eight years ago and four years ago, other than friends and a spouse, whom do you choose based on how much you like a person? Do you choose your surgeon on that basis? If you or a loved one had cancer and were presented with a choice of two surgeons, one known to be an honorable man and loyal husband, the other known for his abrasive personality and for being a womanizer but also known as one of the best cancer surgeons in the country, which would you choose?

We all know the answer. So, why would you choose a president based on marital fidelity or personality traits?

Though they always mention Trump “the liar” (as far as truth-telling is concerned, Trump is Abe Lincoln compared to President Joe Biden), Trump “the adulterer,” Trump “the mean,” and now Trump “the felon” (although no one can tell you what he was charged with), Trump haters would respond that those are not the only reasons why they would never vote for Trump. He is, they constantly tell us, a threat to democracy.

Trump haters have to say that — because they know that merely listing his alleged and actual obnoxious personal traits makes them look foolish. The problem, however, is that the claim that Trump would end democracy in America is baseless. He was already president for four years, and he in no way threatened democracy. Of course, Trump haters will point to Jan. 6 — and only to Jan. 6, because they have no other example from all four years of the Trump presidency of Trump allegedly threatening democracy.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-trump-harris-debate-scorecard

Yes, the moderators of ABC’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were egregiously biased in favor of Harris. Yes, Harris recycled patent lies about Trump without the slightest pushback from the referees—that Trump has embraced the supposedly infamous Project 2025, that he supports a national abortion ban, that he called the anti-Semitic and racist demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2019 “fine people,” that he refused leases to black would-be renters. (The New York Times lauded the ABC team as a “model for real-time fact-checking.”)

But a low-information voter who, incredibly, still has not made up her mind about the election could easily decide for Harris on the basis of Tuesday’s debate. Trump put all his worst traits on display—his narcissism, his gratuitous nastiness, and above all, his penchant for using hyperbole as a substitute for argument.

Conservative commentators have been busy collecting examples of ABC’s shocking partiality. The following set-up, from the worst offender of the two moderators, David Muir, is particularly hilarious in its sycophantic delivery to Harris of a soft pitch over home plate:

[Trump] said he didn’t say that he lost by a whisker. So he still believes he did not lose the election. That was won by President Biden and yourself. But I do want to ask you about something that’s come up in the last couple of days. This was a post from President Trump about this upcoming election just weeks away. He said, “When I win, those people who cheated,” and then he lists donors, voters, election officials, he says “Will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.” One of your campaign’s top lawyers responded saying, “We won’t let Donald Trump intimidate us. We won’t let him suppress the vote.” Is that what you believe he’s trying to do here?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fair-debate-moderators-would-have-fact-checked-harris-on-these-misleading-claims/

The ABC anchors never disputed any of Vice President Kamala Harris’ claims.

Guns

On gun control, the vice president claimed, “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away” and pointed out that both she and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, are gun owners.

In late 2019, though, Harris publicly claimed, “We have to have a buyback program, and I support a mandatory gun buyback program.” Neither moderator probed deeper into her sudden policy shift on the position.

As a senator in 2019, Harris signed onto a bill that would have banned so-called “assault weapons,” a category that encompasses the most commonly owned rifle in America, the AR-15. And at a rally just a month ago, Harris vowed to sign into law a ban on such weapons if she’s elected in November.

The moderators failed to raise Harris’s record in the Senate and the positions she’s taken on the stump this cycle.

Abortion

The moderators also passed up an opportunity to drill down on what, if any, abortion restrictions Harris supports, allowing her to simply deny that abortions were ever performed in the final trimester.

“I absolutely support reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade,” said Harris when asked if she would support any restrictions on abortion.

Although Trump remained uncommitted on vetoing a prospective national abortion ban, Harris refused to oppose abortion in “the eighth month, ninth month, seventh month” when challenged directly by the former president, simply replying, “C’mon.”

“Under Roe v. Wade, you could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month,” Trump said. Harris interrupted him: “That’s not true.”

Roe v. Wade requires a “health exception” up until the point of birth. But the definition of “health” under that framework extends to “mental health, financial concerns, and familial circumstances,” according to the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute.