RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/30/the-emptiness-of-kamala-harris/

The coronation of Kamala Harris is in full swing. With lightning speed, following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, the vice-president secured the backing of enough Democratic power-brokers, donors and media cheerleaders to become the presumptive nominee. So, what does Harris’s rise represent? What does she actually offer to the American public? Does she stand a chance against a resurgent Donald Trump?

Daniel McCarthy – editor-in-chief of Modern Age: A Conservative Review – returned to The Brendan O’Neill last week to discuss how the 2024 presidential election is shaping up. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How do you think Kamala Harris will measure up against a bruiser like Donald Trump?

Daniel McCarthy: The Democratic Party and the media are going to try to repeat what they did in 2020. In that election, they were able to sell the idea of Joe Biden, even though he was not able to go out on the campaign trail. In effect, the pandemic allowed the Democrats to create a product without actually having any substance behind it.

The Democrats are going to try to do this again in a very compressed, four-month schedule. The idea here is to try to make it all happen so quickly that the American public doesn’t have a chance to really think about who Kamala Harris is. They would much rather run a campaign about what people don’t like about Donald Trump, than about what they do like about Kamala Harris.

I don’t think this is going to work. Those who do know who Kamala is are divided between those who think she’s awful, and those Democrats who are just going to take whatever medicine they’re served. I don’t think she’s got a real base of support, and independents are repulsed by her.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/30/kamala-the-authoritarian-calls-election-a-fight-for-freedom/

At her rallies, Vice President Kamala Harris has been portraying the November election as a “fight for freedom.” That’s right coming from someone who spent her entire career attacking freedom – like those enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

In Milwaukee last week, Harris started the crowd chanting “We’re not going back!” After going back and forth with the audience, Harris then says:

“And I’ll tell you why we’re not going back, because ours is a fight for the future. And it is a fight for freedom.”

What are the freedoms she’s talking about? She can only conjure up three.

“The sacred freedom to vote.”

“To live safe from the terror of gun violence”

And ….

“Reproductive freedom.”

It’s not just that this list is so crabbed, it’s what lies underneath each of these “freedoms” that is truly revealing.

”Freedom to vote.” What Harris really means is “freedom to cheat” because Harris equates any attempt to prevent election fraud with disenfranchising voters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/karma_karma_karma_karma_kamaleon.html

Knock, knock.Who’s there?Kamala. Kamala who?Whoever you need me to be.  Cackle cackle.

A mistress to a powerful San Francisco politician twice her age…or a vocal advocate for the “Me Too” movement.  

A tough-on-crime prosecutor…or a “Defund the Police” cheerleader.

A likable-enough pragmatist…or “the most liberal nominee in U.S. history.”

A defender of Israel…or a supporter of Hamas terrorists.

A second-generation immigrant proud of her Indian and Jamaican heritage…or a staunch member of the African-American community who affects a southern accent.

Joe Biden’s trusted “border tsar”…or someone who barely knows where America’s borders are.

Whoever Kamala Harris needs to be in order to advance her career prospects, she will do her best to pretend that is who she has always been.  Her problem — one she shares with many talentless politicians — is that she lacks both the brainpower and the charisma to convince others that she is more than an uninspiring hack.  Usually, such low-caliber politicos peter out in local precincts where could-a-been dreams go to die.  Kamala, however, has always had a knack for finding the right VIP to reward her ambition.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/26/racism-and-sexism-the-campaign-theme-of-the-harris-whoever-ticket/

Is Kamala Harris the quintessential DEI hire? It’s a legitimate question, given that Joe Biden made it clear during his 2020 election-year campaign that he would only consider a black woman for his VP slot. As president, he also claimed that the choice of Supreme Court Justice replacement for Stephen Breyer would be limited to a black woman. Not even the most qualified black woman, just someone possessing dark skin and lady parts.

Biden could have simply told the country that he was going to choose the most qualified person for either position. Instead, he said that his choice was going to be based primarily on skin color and gender.

What has this wrought? Let us tell you, it has positioned the capabilities of otherwise well-qualified people into the corner of racial and sex bias, regardless of intentions. Of course, maybe that was the intention all along.

You cannot convince anyone with even moderate powers of observation that this is not happening. Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris, along with their Democrat power operators, place intrinsic qualities such as skin color, gender, and sexual preference over meritocracy in assigning important roles in government cabinet positions, committee assignments, and security operations.

We have seen the result, and it isn’t pretty.

A former and potential future president was less than an inch away from having his brains blown out of his skull on live television. In a testimony before the House of Representatives on Monday, the head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, with the expressed responsibility of protecting presidential contenders from harm during a campaign, claims that she tried her best but admitted the task was just too much. That implies just about everything toxic about DEI. She has subsequently resigned, much to the relief of everyone.

Let’s explore DEI, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/29/about-that-kamala-harris-ad/

Kamala Harris’ first presidential campaign ad focuses on “freedom.” This might be the most absurd political claim in our lifetimes. The Democratic Party is not interested in liberty. It is concerned with nothing more than expanding its power.

When Harris says in her ad “We choose freedom,” what liberties is she referring to? She never says. Because she can’t. She mentions a few examples – the freedom to “get ahead” and to “be safe from gun violence” – and both are meaningless.

The first “freedoms” is part of our American DNA. What has kept people from getting ahead is a federal, state, and local government framework, whose foundation was laid by Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, then reinforced in the mid-1960s by Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. It is a leviathan that intrudes remorselessly into private matters and over-regulates what should be the free flow of commerce.

Can Harris or any of her defenders point to a single example in which she has fought for deregulation to help Americans “get ahead”? For authentic economic liberty? For individualism? For freedom from government?

The second is simply nonsensical in terms of liberty. True freedom is independence, unrestricted choice to live our lives as we wish without violating the freedom of others, the absence of government interference.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20818/us-elections-the-third-party-isnt-on-the-ticket

One of the dangers that democracies face is that of the machinery of government morphing into a political party with its own culture, traditions, methods and, needless to say, interests — above all that of self-perpetuation. Thus, the US has a third, invisible party, besides the Republicans and Democrats.

That Mandarinate is especially well-entrenched in the State Department, the Pentagon, the Treasury and, more importantly, the judiciary.

It also has well-established, at times incestuous, relations with lobbyists, single-issue activist groups, universities with their tenured academics, and think tanks with rotating doors to government departments and the media.

The Mandarinate maintains close ties with those unmovable, effectively tenured members of the Senate and House of Representatives.

Conspiracy theorists refer to this Mandarinate as “the deep state”.

However, what we are dealing with isn’t the product of a conspiracy by a cabal in a black chamber. It is the organic product of a system in which democracy is reduced to elections, and elections reduced to a beauty contest, just as a set of rituals is often marketed as a religion.

Winning an election is an art; governing is quite a different one.

[T]he closer the decision-making process is to those affected, the stronger a democracy is.

Rebalancing power between Washington and the states has been an issue since the end of the Civil War.

While the two candidates fire abuse at one another, the voter isn’t told what they actually mean to do about cracks in the structures of world order, the war in Ukraine, China as a threat or a rival, the exponential rise of anti-Semitic activities and the deepening of incivility in public life.

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-trump-harris-contrast?lctg=1474934676&recognized_

What a contrast. For those assessing the differences between the two presidential candidates in respect of Israel, feature Prime Minister Netanyahu’s separate meetings with, today, President Trump and, yesterday, Vice President Harris. The former received him warmly at his home in Florida and in the spirit of wartime allies. The latter met him in Washington, said some perfunctory words of support, and then lectured him for killing babies.

“We’ve had a good relationship,” Mr. Trump told reporters today at Mar-a-Lago, after warmly greeting Benjamin and Sarah Netnayahu. “I was very good to Israel, better than any President has ever been,” he said, listing his recognition of the Golan Heights and moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. “Maybe the best thing that I did for Israel,” he said, was walking out on the 2015 Iran deal. Under his maximum pressure policy, Iran was broke. 

Ms. Harris told reporters that she and Mr. Netanyahu had a meeting that was “frank and constructive” — diplomatic doublespeak for dodgy and troublesome. She read out a statement on Israel’s right to defend itself. She said the names of American hostages, and called Hamas a “brutal terror organization.” The rest was dedicated to berating Israel’s Gaza policies, on which she made her now-famous vow: “I will not be silent.”

Mr. Netanyahu, who felt sandbagged, was understandably furious. The Israelis concluded she’d prepared her remarks in advance, didn’t share them with the Israelis, and ignored the fact that Mr. Netanyahu had briefed her on Israel’s humanitarian efforts. Ms. Harris seemed to rely instead on reports by Hamas to anti-Israel human rights organizations, the press, and UN agencies. One such now debunked report claimed Gaza is on the verge of famine.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/25/voters-beware-kamala-harris-would-be-most-far-left-president-in-history-if-you-elect-her/

That didn’t take long, did it? Already our friends in the mainstream media and the Democratic Party’s ever-ready spin-doctors are telling American voters that presumed presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not the extremist she’s portrayed to be by the wicked right-wingers. And they’re right. She’s worse.

There’s nary a policy area that Harris has come into contact with, either while in the White House, as a member of the Senate, or in California state government in which she hasn’t taken a position on the far-extreme of the spectrum — whether it’s immigration, medical care and insurance, foreign policy, abortion, whatever.

She’s almost always reliably on one side of the argument: The far-left side.

Don’t believe it? A 2019 survey by GovTrack, a non-partisan group, rated Harris as the person with the most far-left voting record in the Senate, even beating socialist firebrand Sen. Bernie Sanders for the honor. Perhaps, not by coincidence, that was the same year she began and ended her campaign for the presidency, lacking both voter and financial support.

Here are just a few of Harris’ hard-left positions on issues of vital importance, to give you an idea just how far sinistral side she is. You might want to remember this when the media inevitably start touting her as a “moderate” or even “conservative” on issues. She’s neither:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/07/when-putsch-comes-to-shove/

Scrawled on the mailbox outside the apartment I’m subletting in Manhattan is the message ‘Fuck Trump’. You expect that sort of thing, I suppose, in this often vulgar and always blue city, where any 12 names from the phone book will convict a Republican in a New York minute. About 500-odd miles to the west, in the yard of a heavy machinery dealer beside an Interstate near the West Virginia border, there is a monster flag on a very tall pole with the white-on-navy message ‘Fuck Biden’. One imagines it has now been brought down, just as Biden himself has been brought down, and that in some distant Chinese sweatshop the first rush orders are arriving for ‘Fuck Kamala’ banners.

In America’s legacy newsrooms, there has been no need for such prompts or instructions to begin stoking, as Joni Mitchell put it, “the star-maker machinery of the popular song”. And boy, was the media choir quick to get on-song with their hymns to Her. Behold Kamala, not the cackling klutz you might think you remember but a newly sainted smasher of glass ceilings, a strong woman  overlooked and underappreciated for too long. This has been quite the somersault. The same field hacks and big house pundits who just four weeks ago decried any coverage and all footage of doddering Joe as “cheap fakes” have performed contortions that would daunt the India Rubber Man.

The shamelessness is breath-taking and recourse to salty exclamation at the chutzpah of it all almost unavoidable. Today, the woman it appears Jill Biden picked to lead the secret Service was being grilled on Capitol Hill about the attempt on Donald Trump’s life and it didn’t go well for her. Mind you, this is one failure that can’t be laid at the for-the-moment president’s feet as it certainly wasn’t Old Joe who selected Kimberly Cheatle. Asked just before he came down with Covid (reportedly, if you believe it) if the Secret Service director should resign, he expressed confidence in “him”. In that same interview he also forgot the name of his Defence Secretary, calling him “you know, the black man”. That he might not recall Lloyd Bentsen isn’t terribly surprising as eight months have passed since the last White House cabinet meeting. Yes, eight months. One might object to the way Biden was ousted by the big-dollar donors and Democrat silverbacks whose actions say they value fourteen million primary voters not at all, but there can be no argument the man being thrown on the scrap heap is nowhere near fit to serve nor has been for quite some time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/creating-the-cult-of-kamala/

Whether it’s a product of motivated reasoning or wishful thinking, the race is on to make America’s famously maladroit vice president into a cultural sensation.

If there was going to be an upside to Joe Biden’s presidency, its earliest days suggested it might be found in the lack of a cult of personality around the man. The president inspired support and opposition in Americans but not abject devotion. He was a functionary – a flawed and fallible bureaucrat – and it would be healthy for the country to revert to the mean after twelve consecutive years in which the president was regarded by his supporters as the personification of the national will. That experiment ended in failure.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Biden years proved that presidents who are not ballasted by celebrity worship sink into the abyss. The president’s camp conceded as much with its bewildering campaign to popularize “dark Brandon” – a vaguely menacing figure with lasers for eyes and a conspicuous appetite for ice cream, who, as Politico put it, is also “a master of the political dark arts.”  The artifice was a bad fit for Biden, but the enterprise acknowledged a lamentable truth: In the absence of a pop mythology and the thoughtless adulation that accompanies it, the president will be evaluated on his or her performance alone. In a polarized era typified by broad and sustained dissatisfaction with the status quo, that would be a heavy lift even for an accomplished chief executive. For the middling sort, it’s the kiss of death.