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ELECTIONS

The Myriad Projections of the 2024 Campaign If you don’t want what the people want, you have to project. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/19/the-myriad-projections-of-the-2024-campaign/

Projectionism

Projection is a Freudian psychological term. It describes a particular defensive mechanism, when people, often unconsciously, attribute their own (usually undesirable) behaviors to others who do not have them.

These mental gymnastics are intended to alleviate one’s own guilt or sense of inadequacy at the expense of another.

Sound familiar?

But in the political sphere, projection involves more overt dissimulation. It is increasingly common for leftist candidates or political parties to falsely accuse their opponents of the very destructive behaviors and unpopular agendas that they themselves embrace, but out of political necessity must deny.

Rather than an unconscious Freudian defense mechanism, political projection is usually a conscious strategy of hiding one’s own negatives by fobbing them off on antagonists.

Projection often proves a quite successful ploy.

After all, the political projectionist knows best his own hazardous or off-putting conduct and policies. And so, he can most skillfully attribute just these liabilities to those who have had no experience with them.

Our Leftist Projectionists

The 2024 Harris-Walz campaign is turning out to be projectionist to the core. How?

First: Kamala Harris and her new running mate Governor Tim Walz have long advanced fringe leftist political agendas. (Her “everyone needs to be woke” and his claim that riots happen because society doesn’t prioritize “equity and inclusion.”)

They have been loud in their fringe cultural commentaries, which are not just unpopular but roundly rejected by the majority of the electorate. And they know that if they become open and honest about what they have done, they will likely be defeated.

Second: On a more personal level, both are attacking the behavior and conduct of their rivals as a way of deflecting attention from their own weaknesses on that score.

Thus, this kind of projection, about both policy and personal behavior, is more common on the left because its ideology is fundamentally far more distant from the views of most voters.

Harris/Walz: Mostly Peaceful By J.B. Shurk

EXCERPT:

Walz lazily watched as Black Lives Matter and Antifa arsonists burned parts of Minneapolis and Saint Paul to the ground during 2020’s “summer of love” riots.  (His wife enjoyed the carnage so much that she spent her nights getting high from the smell of incinerated businesses.)  Not to be upstaged, Harris encouraged people to donate to sketchy groups bailing out criminals who had been arrested for vandalizing property, looting stores, torching police precincts, and attacking citizens unfortunate enough to reside within Walz’s Twin Cities.  This is what the Democrap Party sees as stand-up leadership these days: a couple of terrorist sympathizers willing to promote violence against Americans for personal political gain.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think politicians who fail to protect cities should be put in charge of protecting nations.  On the other hand, if the goal is to “let America burn,” Walz and Harris make perfect sense.  Walz is an out-and-proud Maoist who enjoys vacationing in China (including celebrating his nuptials in Tiananmen Square).  Harris not only supercharged inflation by casting the deciding vote for the Green New Deal boondoggle but also plans on using government force to further manipulate food, fuel, and housing markets.  If Tim and Kam get the chance, they will do everything they can to transform the United States into Maduro’s Venezuela.  They will light the whole country ablaze and leave America in “mostly peaceful” ashes.

Beware Extremists in Green Hats at the Democratic National Convention By Robert Stilson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/beware-extremists-in-green-hats-at-the-democratic-national-convention/

The far-left, anti-Israel National Lawyers Guild has been mobilizing to assist the tens of thousands of protesters expected to hit the streets of Chicago.

If demonstrations unfold as expected at the Democratic National Convention next week, look for an occasional fluorescent-green hat among the protesters. This is the signature headgear worn by National Lawyers Guild (NLG) legal observers, who can often be found attending major left-wing protests in support of the demonstrators. They represent an organization that has long been one of the most deeply radical activist groups in the country and one that harbors a particularly virulent hostility toward Israel. They have expressed that hostility in some truly appalling ways.

Next week in Chicago, scores of radical groups are promising to “March on the DNC.” While the protesters’ ancillary demands span the full “Everything Leftism” spectrum, the overriding motivation is animosity toward “apartheid Israel” and the Democratic Party’s alleged complicity in a “genocide” in Gaza. Tens of thousands are expected to take to the streets.

For months, members of the NLG — a nonprofit association of leftist attorneys, law students, and other legal workers — have been mobilizing in anticipation, promising “on-the-ground support to all the courageous protesters.” This includes training sessions in protesters’ rights, assistance for any demonstrators who are arrested, and access to a network of volunteer attorneys ready to represent those facing charges. The guild’s local Chicago chapter will operate a 24/7 legal support hot line for convention protesters.

Democratic convention to push for Israel arms embargo Andrea Shalal

https://www.aol.com/pro-palestinian-delegates-democratic-convention-195700854.html

CHICAGO (Reuters) -Dozens of Muslim delegates and their allies, angry at U.S. support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza, are seeking changes in the Democratic platform and plan to press for an arms embargo this week, putting the party on guard for disruptions to high-profile speeches at its national convention in Chicago.

Calling itself “Delegates Against Genocide,” the pro-Palestinian group says it will exercise its freedom of speech rights during main events at the four-day Democratic National Convention convening on Monday to formally nominate Vice President Kamala Harris for president in the Nov. 5 election against Republican former President Donald Trump.

Group organizers declined to give details, but said they were encouraging supporters to wear Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves, and to carry Palestinian flags, and would seek changes in the party platform, while urging delegates to speak on the convention floor.

President Joe Biden is due to speak on Monday and Harris on Thursday.

Pro-Palestinian delegates say they deserve a bigger role in the writing of the party platform.

The group wants to include language backing enforcement of laws that ban giving military aid to individuals or security forces that commit gross violations of human rights.

“We’re going to make our voices heard,” said Liano Sharon, a Jewish business consultant and delegate who signed an alternative platform along with 34 other delegates. “Freedom of expression necessarily includes the right to stand up and be heard even when the authority in the room says to shut up.”

On Gov. Tim Walz, Covid lockdown fanatic At least he came by his insanity honestly (unlike his descriptions of his military service); ex-Minnesotan and censor-in-chief Andy Slavitt was one of his top advisors: Alex Berenson

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/on-gov-tim-walz-covid-lockdown-fanatic

Everything is connected. Especially Covid authoritarians.

Before he conspired to violate my civil rights and make Twitter ban my journalism in 2021, Democratic healthcare operative Andrew M. Slavitt was a top Covid advisor to Minnesota governor Tim Walz.

With Slavitt’s encouragement, Walz pushed a tight lockdown on his state. He encouraged residents to snitch on each other on a state-run hotline. And he sharply tightened Minnesota’s rules on gatherings in November 2020, long after it was clear Covid was a threat mainly to the very elderly and could not cause hospital overrun.

How badly did Walz panic in fall 2020? He essentially destroyed Thanksgiving. On Nov. 19, 2020, one week before the holiday, Walz barred “indoor or outdoor [emphasis added] gatherings, except with immediate household members” and added “no person from outside your immediate household should enter your home.” He also closed bars, restaurants, gyms, movie theaters, organized sports, and pools.

Of course, months earlier, when protests and riots over the death of George Floyd had rocked Minneapolis in May and June 2020, Walz had taken a different view. “We certainly believe that there’s a right that people have to gather,” he told reporters.

Walz’s crackdowns received less attention than those by Democratic governors in states like California and New York.

But his power grab was arguably more problematic because Minnesota is more closely politically divided than the coastal blue states and Walz’s lockdown faced more open opposition. In spring 2020, the protests were fairly narrow.

But after Walz’s November orders, business owners openly revolted, and police largely refused to enforce the rules.

The Polls Have Shifted Toward Harris. Is It Real, or Something Else?

https://dnyuz.com/2024/08/16/the-polls-have-shifted-toward-harris-is-it-real-or-something-else/

Last week’s New York Times/Siena College polls showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading in three swing states led some Republicans and Democrats to ask the same question: Is this real?

At the center of this question is whether the Times/Siena polls have enough voters who supported Donald J. Trump in 2020. The Trump campaign released a memo arguing that our polls would have actually showed a Trump lead if we had weighted the results properly.

The Trump campaign’s critique focused on something pollsters refer to as “recalled vote.” In the polls of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, respondents recalled backing President Biden over Mr. Trump by six points, 52 percent to 46 percent, even though Mr. Biden actually won these three states by an average of about 1.5 points. The Trump campaign used this data point to say Mr. Trump would have led if the poll had the “right” number of Trump 2020 supporters.

This isn’t an absurd argument. In recent years, many pollsters have embraced recalled vote in exactly the way the Trump campaign describes: as an accurate measure of how people voted in the last election, which can then be used to evaluate the partisan balance of the sample. As an idea, it makes logical sense.

But over the longer run, recalled vote hasn’t usually been very reliable. Oddly enough, this is one of the first things I remember learning when I started getting interested in polling methodology in the fall of 2004. Back then, it was George W. Bush who led the polls, and it was the Democrats trying to prove that the polls were skewed. Among other things, they argued the polls had too many Bush ’00 voters, based on recalled vote.

A CBS News/Times poll at the time, for instance, found Mr. Bush and John Kerry tied, but Bush ’00 voters outnumbered Al Gore ’00 voters by six points. Mr. Gore won the popular vote in 2000; if the poll had the “right” number of Gore supporters, Democrats thought, Mr. Kerry would have led — perhaps by a lot. Plausible, right?

Needless to say, the polls leading up to Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election were not badly underestimating Mr. Kerry, as the recalled vote implied. This is not an isolated occurrence: Asking how people voted in the last election has been unreliable dating all the way to the earliest polls.

A Borderline Election by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20867/borderline-election

In this presidential election year, it is time to do the math.

Not the traditional math of counting electors, calculating swing states voters, or debating polling data. No. It’s time to do the math regarding the profound and stunning increase in the number of new citizens who will be eligible to vote in this year’s exercise in democracy.

According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) the fiscal year 2022 saw one million new citizens sworn in, citing it as the highest number of naturalizations in nearly 15 years. The government agency says this number reflects the Biden Administration’s effort to address the backlog of applications that had grown during the COVID pandemic.

The FY 2023 statistics saw 878,500 new citizens participate in naturalization ceremonies that make them eligible to vote. By doing the math, we find that naturalizations in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 made up nearly a quarter of all naturalizations over the past decade.

It is as if Washington seeks to consciously create a demographic sea change as to who will now be able to go to the polls in 2024.

There is a Pew study breakdown of where these new voters are coming from.

Their report reveals that Mexico is the top country of birth for U.S. immigrants. It states that in 2022, over 10 million immigrants living in the U.S. were born there, or 23% of all immigrants. India, with the second-largest share, was far behind at 6%, followed by China came at five percent, the Philippines at four percent, and the Latin American nation of El Salvador stood at three percent.

What these various numbers mean is that the nation’s electoral base has changed over the last four years, either through a deliberate political calculation or by happenstance. For those of us who don’t believe in coincidences, it potentially represents a subtle, even unscrupulous, strategy to change the outcome on Election Day.

Kamala Harris’s First Policy Proposal Is Economically Illiterate Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harriss-first-policy-proposal-is-economically-illiterate/

On policy, Kamala Harris is starting to put some meat on her campaign’s otherwise bare bones. Her earliest attempt at setting policy involved brazenly appropriating Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on income derived from tips, which enthused neither progressives nor anyone else who understands how broad-based income tax relief actually works. But the vice president’s first real effort to expound on her own economic thinking is no less vacuous. Ahead of what her campaign is promoting as an economic policy speech on Friday, Harris previewed her plan to reduce consumer prices. So far, it seems her plan consists of simply ordering prices to be lower.

“Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday will call on Congress to pass a federal ban on price gouging as part of her economic platform to lower grocery prices and everyday costs,” Politico reported on Wednesday night. This float is light on details, but the dispatch indicated that Harris would enforce her plan to impose price stability on the market by decree via the Federal Trade Commission, which would be empowered along with state attorneys general “to investigate and levy penalties on food companies that violate the federal ban.”

That sounds a lot like a series of proposals Joe Biden outlined in his February State of the Union address, during and after which the president attacked companies that raise prices in response to macroeconomic conditions or attempt to meet demand by reducing the amount of product available for the same price — what Biden deemed “shrinkflation.” You remember that, right? Of course, you don’t! Because nothing at all came of it. It was a rank pander to the economically illiterate. And despite the presence of many who fit that description in the federal legislature, there are enough members of Congress who understand that allowing the executive branch to functionally set prices is a braindead idea that would only hurt consumers in the long run.

Republicans Must Make a Laser-Focused, Issues-Based Case to the People If Republicans can successfully frame the 2024 election as boiling down to the actual issues—the economy, inflation, immigration, and crime—then they stand a strong chance of prevailing. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/16/republicans-must-make-a-laser-focused-issues-based-case-to-the-people/

One of my favorite bits of ancient wisdom, which I have quoted many times over the years, is the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu’s adage that a battle is won before it is fought because it is won by choosing the terrain on which it is fought. Accordingly, as I noted in a column a few months ago: “If former President Donald Trump and other Republicans on the ballot this fall want to win, they must choose the proper terrain.”

He who controls the narrative and framing necessarily controls the result. Every good trial lawyer knows this. And so should every good politician.

Although recent days have been more focused and suggest a possible turning of the tide, the electoral terrain for Republicans has generally been rather shaky ever since the bloodless Kamala Harris coup of Joe Biden a few weeks ago. Asking whether Harris—the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants—actually counts as “Black” for U.S. demographic purposes is fair substantive game, but it is certainly not fertile swing voter terrain. Even less compelling, and certainly less propitious, is incontinent friendly fire directed at the popular governor of a crucial swing state, Georgia.

Early voting begins in Pennsylvania, arguably this election’s single most decisive battleground state, on Sept. 16. That is just around the corner. Can Republicans pull it together in time and successfully define the electoral terrain?

Republicans are not entirely themselves to blame for the current state of the race, which has seen the GOP squander much of its momentum from the former president’s heroic survival of an assassination attempt and the party’s successful nominating convention. The corporate media has aided Democrats every step of the way. After pretending to be real journalists for a few weeks and holding Biden accountable for his palpable senility, the Washington press corps immediately returned to regime-apologist form after party elites succeeded in their coup. Thus, the present spectacle of Harris not answering a single real question from the press for nearly four weeks. Funny how quickly the media went from probing to outright laconic.

The Lies of Tim Walz Is he guilty of “stolen valor”? by Scott Hogenson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lies-of-tim-walz/

The flap over military service involving Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz marks the biggest controversy of its kind in 20 years. Two decades ago, there was intense scrutiny of John Kerry’s service in the Navy’s swift boat fleet during the Vietnam War, an issue that arose in his 2004 presidential bid. I remember it well after working on President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign that year.

Questions and accusations swirled around Kerry’s Purple Hearts and his Bronze and Silver Star medals. Much of the attention focused on whether Kerry actually deserved his decorations. The circumstances involving Kerry’s three Purple Hearts, awarded to those wounded in action against the enemy, did not result in him ever being taken off duty for medical treatment. His wounds were minor and superficial, but they were wounds nonetheless.

Bronze Stars were commonly awarded to officers in Vietnam; a highly decorated Army colonel once told me that any officer who came home alive got one. As for Kerry’s Silver Star, the third highest military award, some argued his actions did not meet the standard of gallantry required for receiving that medal.

The Swift Boat controversy of 20 years ago hurt Kerry politically, but there’s a big difference between his situation and that of Tim Walz. John Kerry received those medals, and the citations for them are of record; he did not lie to voters. Walz did.

Walz previously claimed to have retired from the Army National Guard as a command sergeant major, designated by the rank of E-9, which is false. He never completed the rigorous requirements to deserve that rank and retired as a master sergeant, an E-8. He simply lied about his rank many times and over many years.