RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/30/the-post-election-temper-tantrum/

Two months ago, as the Democrats were preparing for their national convention in Chicago, we were concerned that it would be a repeat of the party’s 1968 convention that was marred by riots. But sanity prevailed. It was a relatively quiet affair. Will the Democrats be just as quiet if Donald Trump wins next week’s election? It’s more likely that they will erupt with rage.

After all, there have been two failed attempts to assassinate Trump. Yes, the suspects in both cases appear to be disturbed. But it’s been the nonstop vilification of the former president from the left that likely motivated them. The prospect of another term for Trump is going to push many over the edge that they’ve been teetering on since the man announced in 2015 that he was running for president.

From the Oct. 28 Wall Street Journal:

Across America, more than a dozen progressives in various positions of influence told The Wall Street Journal that they are dreading the prospect of Trump’s return to power, and dismayed that half the country might see a completely different reality than they see. Some are bracing for unrest. On a recent evening, more than 200 people joined a Zoom meeting titled Mass Training For Women’s Safety Teams — hosted by a Women’s March veteran who noted its timing amid ‘escalating political violence.’”

There is precedent. Trump’s 2016 election win provoked an outbreak of violence that lasted for days.

“For the third night in a row, anti-Donald Trump demonstrators took to the streets in several big cities and on college campuses across the United States, including an outburst of smashed windows and a dumpster fire in Portland that police countered with pepper spray and flash-bang devices,” USA Today reported on Nov. 11, 2016.

The day before, Al Jazeera said the protests against “Trump’s election victory had turned violent.”

Months later, on Jan. 21, 2017, Reuters reported “black-clad activists among hundreds of demonstrators protesting Donald Trump’s swearing-in on Friday clashed with police a few blocks from the White House, in an outburst of violence rare for an inauguration.” At least 217 were arrested.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/26/why-the-nazi-slur-has-no-power/

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Donald Trump is a fascist, a Nazi even. And you don’t have to take my word for it. The entirety of the political and media establishments is saying as much. The Atlantic says so. Vice President Kamala Harris says so. Even Hillary Clinton says so. The closing argument of this election, it seems, is that nothing matters except that Donald Trump is Hitler reincarnated.

The problem for the Democratic candidate and her supporters is that nobody cares. This “case” against Donald Trump won’t sway a single vote.

To be clear, it’s not that nobody would care if they had reason to, but they don’t have a reason. The accusations against President Trump fall on deaf ears because the political left has spent the last several decades—and the last couple of centuries, in some cases—ensuring that no one takes such allegations seriously.

For starters, the left has a “boy who cried wolf” problem. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to Democrats when they prattle on about Republicans being fascists because they have done so for almost as long as anyone can remember. Various wags on social media have insisted that Democrats have compared “every Republican since Reagan” to Hitler. In truth, it goes back even further than that, to the dawn of the modern GOP. As Steven Hayward noted ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s famous convention speech, even he was “Hitler”:

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.”
Civil rights activist Roy Wilkins: Goldwater’s election “would bring about a police state.”
California Governor Pat Brown: Goldwater’s acceptance speech “had the stench of fascism…. All we needed to hear was ‘Heil Hitler.’”
Jackie Robinson: “I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
San Francisco Mayor John Shelley: The Republicans “had Mein Kampf as their political bible.”

None of this is to say that a wolf will never, ever appear on the political scene. Rather, it’s to say that because of the left’s fecklessness, if one does, no one will ever recognize it as such.

During her recent Town Hall on CNN with Anderson Cooper, Vice President Kamala Harris told her audience that she believes Donald Trump is a fascist.  It would have been interesting to hear her response if she was asked to define what the term “fascist” means. 

Clearly, she has no clue.  If she did, she never would have taken the bait and answered the question.  In reality, she and the policies of the Democratic Party have more in common with fascism than MAGA world. 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines fascism as:

A populist political philosophy, movement, or regime… that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition. At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or in a word, nation. 

Harris and her fellow Democrats use the terms “fascist” and “patriot” interchangeably to suit their narrative.  Their supporters are “patriots.”  Republicans or Americans who take issue with their policies, are “fascists.”   President Biden highlighted the point when he referred to Republicans and Trump supporters as “semi-fascists.”   Putting aside that the term “semi-fascist” has no knowable definition, the intent of the accusation was clear, accuse Trump and his supporters of being as evil as Hitler.  It was offensive when Biden made the statement.  It is no less offensive now when Harris uses the term so flippantly. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamala-loses-one-person-cnn-debate/

As we enter the final stretch of election season, every day seems to bring another Trump/Vance victory in spite of a hostile media, and another embarrassing loss by the Harris/Walz campaign. Recently, for example, Trump endeared himself to regular Americans by putting on an apron and working the McDonald’s drive-thru; conversely, McDonald’s dealt a fatal blow to Kamala’s claim she had worked for them as a teenager by releasing a statement declaring they could find no evidence of that. She is looking more and more like the most hapless, brainless, inauthentic, unqualified presidential nominee in modern history, if not ever. Even the state media like CNN can’t cover for her anymore, as evidenced by the tepid assessments of CNN commentators in the wake of Kamala’s recent CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper.

To recap: when the Democrats realized that Joe Biden could no longer be propped up as their 2024 candidate, they found themselves painted into a corner. The Democrat kingmakers – Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Valerie Jarrett – needed to step in and depose the decrepit Biden but didn’t want to fall back on Vice President Harris, whom they knew was devoid of accomplishments, likeability, brains, and presidential charisma, but how could they not go with her? Running the vice president as the nominee would ordinarily be the obvious move; leap-frogging over Kamala and selecting someone else would be a clear acknowledgement that she had never been anything but a diversity hire. And how could the party of identity politics not go with a “woman of color”? It would discredit their entire ideology.

So they rolled the dice and installed Kamala, knowing she was not ready for prime time but counting on a supportive media and a strategy of painting Trump as Hitler 2.0 to get her over the finish line. But in the ensuing months she has not only not risen to the occasion, she and her campaign are flailing to such an extent that all they have left is to fear-monger hysterically about Trump as A Threat to Democracy™.

Then came CNN’s Wednesday evening town hall in Philadelphia. David Urban nailed it when he declared afterward that she lost a one-person debate. A couple of examples of her prevaricating and fumbling will suffice to give a sense of just how badly the event went for her.

When Cooper hit her with a question she should have seen coming from a mile away – is Trump’s idea of a border wall actually “stupid,” as she had initially called it? – she panicked immediately and rambled about Trump until Cooper interjected to get her back on track. As an open borders enthusiast who plans to give citizenship to millions of illegals in the country, she had the nerve to say that there needs to be a legal process for immigration and that she will secure the border. Cooper flustered her further by pressing: “So you don’t think the idea of a border wall is stupid anymore?” and she responded again by attacking Trump and complaining that “he didn’t do much of anything” with the wall.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/24/its-unhinged-to-compare-trump-to-hitler/

It was the October surprise that surprised no one. America’s political and media elites have this week alleged that Donald Trump is just like Adolf Hitler. This might be a little more shocking if they hadn’t been claiming exactly this for the best part of eight years.

The prompt for the latest round of hysterical Trump-Nazi comparisons came from John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff turned Trump-hater. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly claimed that his former boss spoke wistfully of Hitler and said he wished that he had Hitler’s generals. Kelly is certain that Trump meets the ‘definition of a fascist’, having found a general definition online.

Trump’s campaign adamantly refutes Kelly’s claims. But vice-president Kamala Harris, Trump’s increasingly desperate presidential rival, has predictably seized on Kelly’s comments. She took time out from her busy schedule of preparing truly terrible answers for her CNN Town Hall yesterday, to stand in front of a podium with the presidential seal on it and denounce Trump as ‘a fascist’ who wants ‘unchecked’ power. Citing Kelly’s claims, she said that Trump wants ‘a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States’.

It seems the empty ‘joyous’ vibe that initially characterised Harris’s campaign has now given way to dystopian fear-mongering about the return of fascism. Harris is now reviving the core message of Joe Biden’s campaign – that Trump poses an existential, fascist-like threat to American democracy. It’s desperate stuff.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/harris-finally-crashes-and-burns-on-cnn/

Even CNN’s own analysts panned the Democratic nominee’s performance. This was her first authentic campaign disaster.

The engines have flared out right at the end of the flight. The tank is out of gas. The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.

You may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.

Last night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments from this event — many moments, oh so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got Here.” (And if she wins? All is not forgiven, merely set aside — until the reality of her as president for four years takes its toll on Democratic fortunes, which will be quickly.)

As for myself, I found Harris’s answer to Anderson Cooper’s pointed question about the border fence to be perhaps the lowest moment of her entire public career to date, and I mean that in the specific sense that nobody who watches it — not even her fiercest partisans — will be able to come away from it with anything save a reflex-level revulsion. (For her friends, the reaction will be shame and desire to change the subject. For her enemies, it will be glee. For the vast majority of normal voters, it will simply be: “DO NOT WANT.”)

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/10/the-hierarchy-of-democratic-deceit.php

It is a well-known pattern going back decades now that Democratic candidates conceal their leftist views from the voters, running as moderates, and sometimes, like Democratic Senator Bob Casey in Pennsylvania right now, practically denying they are even Democrats! We’ve seen how Kamala Harris has disavowed her previous far-left issue statements wholesale, while winking to the progressive base that “my values haven’t changed.”

I’m not sure it is working. Last weekend when driving around Berkeley, where there are always a ton of lawn signs ahead of an election, I noted how few Harris-Walz signs there were. If you delve into left-wing social media, you find out very quickly that a lot of progressives are furious with Harris for moving to the middle and abandoning her previous positions. The Bernie-swills are convinced that this is why she is slipping! For example:

One of the issues most conspicuously missing from the Harris campaign is climate change, which we are told is the greatest existential crisis facing humanity evah! If they really believe this, don’t you think they’d be talking about it more? Of course, as we reported back in June, there is solid survey evidence, from Democratic pollsters, that talking about electric cars actually reduced support for Joe Biden. (And now several Democratic candidates are saying “What electric car mandate? Never heard of it. . .” Even though their votes are on the record.)

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/25/trumps-media-haters-still-dont-get-it/

Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the author. To read the entire article, click here.

This is an actual headline that appeared in a “journalism” newsletter 13 days before the election: “How much coverage of Donald Trump is too much?”

The column is from Tom Jones, senior media writer at the Poynter Institute and, you’ll not be surprised to learn, a man consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’ve said in the past that Jones’ daily “Poynter Report” column would be more accurately titled, “Why I Hate Donald Trump and Fox News.” (For what it’s worth, Jones would dispute this. In 2020, I sent him an email pointing out glaring biases evident in his commentary. He responded, among other things, by writing, “I can promise you that I don’t have an agenda other than to point out really good journalism and call out shoddy journalism.” Self-awareness apparently isn’t his strong suit.)

These days I only occasionally read Jones’ tedious, predictable commentaries, and only then for the same reason that a child pinches himself: to see how much pain I can endure.

In this instance, Jones claims to be upset that the legacy media has devoted so much time to Trump trolling Kamala Harris in a McDonald’s photo op and his outrageous asides, most notably ruminating on the late Arnold Palmer’s junk.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-joins-republican-party-the-party-of-common-sense/

Tulsi Gabbard announced Tuesday night she is officially joining the Republican Party as she continues stumping for former president Donald Trump on the campaign trail two weeks out from the November election.

Gabbard left the Democratic Party to become an independent in October 2022 and endorsed Trump in August after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also a Democrat-turned-independent, ended his longshot presidential campaign and threw his support behind the GOP nominee.

“It is because of my love for our country and specifically because of the leadership that President Trump has brought to transform the Republican Party,” Gabbard said at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., “that I’m proud to stand here with you today, President Trump, and announce that I’m joining the Republican Party.”

The move seemed to surprise Trump as he appeared on stage. After her speech, Trump said he “didn’t know” Gabbard had decided to join the Republican Party.

“I’m joining the party of the people, the party of equality, the party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country,” she said in explaining her decision. “It is the party of common sense and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.”

In her leadup to the big announcement, Gabbard slammed her former party and Vice President Kamala Harris for being “anti-freedom,” “pro-censorship,” “pro-open borders,” and “pro-war.” She also criticized Harris for “shamelessly” accepting endorsements from “warmongers” like Dick and Liz Cheney, reiterating that a second Trump presidency represents peace. Trump has vowed to end the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza.