RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/

In the days following last week’s vice-presidential debate, there has been a barrage of polling and commentary focused on how the debate does not matter. While it is true that, historically and statistically, vice-presidential debates do little to shift public opinion, this particular debate between Vance and Walz is different in three important ways.

First, the debate showed that Vance complements Trump in a way that expands the ticket’s vision for America. This is important because Americans ultimately vote for a vision. Second, the debate is taking place in the context of unprecedented political times, which puts more emphasis on every public forum the candidates engage in, including last week’s debate. Third, both Harris and Walz, since becoming a ticket, have given the fewest number of interviews and press conferences out of any presidential duo in history. This fact increases the significance of the debate as one of the few significant ways Americans can learn about the little-known Walz.

On the first point, Trump and Vance are complementary in a way that is unusual for a Republican ticket. Since 1984, which is when the first vice-presidential debate took place, there have been few tickets in which the vice-presidential pick has contributed positively to the presidential candidate’s vision. For example, in 2008, John McCain’s pick, Sarah Palin, ended up hurting McCain in the polls due to uncertainty about her qualifications and competence. McCain even acknowledged later on that he regretted picking Palin. In 2016, Mike Pence, Trump’s pick, was a standard, run-of-the-mill conservative who neither brought a fresh perspective on Trump’s vision nor was particularly engaging or charismatic to voters.

The debate last week showed that Vance is a unique pick in that he supplements Trump’s America-First vision. Trump’s vision, fundamentally, is about common sense, strength, and competence. Vance not only possesses common sense, strength, and competence, but also complements this vision with the additions of humaneness, empathy, relatability, and intellect. Unlike Pence, Vance is a force to be reckoned with. Taken as a collective, the comprehensive vision that the Trump-Vance ticket is putting forth is not just about Making America Great Again, which is the root of the vision; it is also a people-first, rather than party-first or elite-first. It is vision that focuses on fixing a country that has never been so broken in our lifetime. Even before Vance became the vice-presidential nominee, his relatability was evident through the popular appeal of his book, Hillbilly Elegy. The debate last week allowed the American people to see that crucial aspect come through in a direct way as Vance answered each question with strength, intellect, and poise, and also treated Walz with respect. On the immigration issue, Trump brought an unmistakable urgency and call to action to the issue during his debate with Kamala Harris. During the vice-presidential debate, Vance supplemented that urgency with specific facts and stories.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/15/non-citizens-will-vote-in-november-the-only-question-is-how-many/

Eight years ago, the mainstream media told us in no uncertain terms that noncitizens don’t vote in American elections. “There is no evidence,” they said. The likely number “is zero.”

They were provably wrong then – there’d been multiple accounts of noncitizens who’d registered and voted in elections. In the years since, the evidence of this problem has piled up higher. But the media are still at it. It’s “extremely rare,” they say. It never “affects the outcome of a race.” Republicans are looking to “blame illegals” if Donald Trump loses, etc.

Here’s one example of the disconnect.

An audit of Texas voter rolls in 2019 found 95,000 noncitizens who’d registered, 58,000 of whom voted in an election. This year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he’d removed 6,500 noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls, nearly 2,000 of whom voted.

Yet just this weekend, ABC News ran a piece titled: “In South Texas, the myth of noncitizen voting takes center stage.”

But it’s the media that’s peddling the myth. Voter rolls are criminally outdated and error prone. Some states are so eager to register voters that they don’t put up needed safeguards. When election officials do bother to audit their registration rolls, they keep turning up thousands of noncitizens.

https://www.thefp.com/p/election-2024-battle-of-the-sexes?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=150194655&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=8t06w&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is in the midst of a media blitz designed to woo male voters. And it’s not going great. On Friday, former NFL player Michael Strahan gave “Coach Walz” a thorough grilling in a Good Morning America interview. On Saturday, Walz—who loves to remind voters that he is a keen hunter—fumbled about with a shotgun in a way that didn’t exactly scream “I do this all the time.” 

Walz’s clumsy push for male votes is a reminder of one of the silliest ideas going this election cycle: that the Minnesota governor is a paragon of modern masculinity whose selection as Kamala Harris’s running mate was a masterstroke that would win over male voters. 

Or at least that’s what the press insisted. (See here and here and here.) One Bloomberg headline summed it up: “Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans.” 

“Any liberal Democrat whose résumé includes football coach, military veteran, and sharpshooting hunter is a challenge to MAGA mythology,” wrote reporter Francis Wilkinson. 

In an article titled “Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left,” New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister praised this species of Democratic man as “newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.” She contrasts that with the Republican Party’s view of manhood, with its “furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers.” 

MSNBC, meanwhile, is running an entire series on “MAGA and Masculinity in 2024” that promises to “examine the societal fallout from right-wing hypermasculinity—and the people fighting its toxic messaging by positively redefining what it means to be a man.”

Meanwhile, Doug Emhoff can be praised for “redefining masculinity” while copping to an affair with his kids’ nanny and being accused of hitting an ex-girlfriend. What was that about believing all women? 

If any of this was supposed to win the votes of American men, shockingly it doesn’t seem to have worked. The latest NBC poll suggests the gender divide is as wide as ever, with a 30-point gap between the voting preferences of men and women. And in this battle of the sexes, Trump appears to have the edge, up 16 points among men compared to Kamala’s 14-point lead among women. 

Things are so bad that, on Friday in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama admonished black men for not supporting Kamala Harris in greater numbers. “You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you because you think that’s a sign of strength because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.” 

In other words: Vote Democrat, you sexist pigs! 

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=https%3A%2F%2Fchristopherrufo.com%2Fp%2Fkamala-harriss-plagiarism-problem&utm_medium=email

Kamala Harris has become famous, in part, for her unique rhetorical style. She switches freely between various accents and peppers her speeches with catchphrases: pondering falling “out of a coconut tree,” discussing “the significance of the passage of time,” and moving the nation toward “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

To her supporters, the vice president’s rhetorical flourishes represent the values of compassion and optimism. To her detractors, her reliance on platitudes and tautologies demonstrates her unfitness for the presidency.

But, as we have discovered in this exclusive report, another element appears to exist within Kamala Harris’s rhetorical universe: plagiarism.

At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.

However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)

Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:

In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.

There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:

High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.

http://The Curious Attraction of Donald Trump

Despite the fact that he is coarse, rude and humorless, Donald Trump is attractive to millions of Americans. Most are religious and believe in their families and communities; they are patriotic, diligent, and endowed with an uncommon level of common sense. But what accounts for this attraction? While I don’t pretend to have all the reasons, simply addressing the question is instructional. He is despised by those who have made service in government their life’s work. He is despised by those who find vulgar his ravaging of the English language. He is despised by those who cannot stand his orange hair and red ties. On the other hand, he is loved by those who represent what Franklin Roosevelt once referred to as the “Forgotten Man” – America’s working men and women at the middle and lower end of the economic scale. His acolytes are those who do not neatly fit into an elitist identity – meaning they are largely white, working class people from fly-over states, those who Barack Obama once derided as clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” In other words, he is attractive to America’s broad middle class.

These people have watched as Democrat-led, Washington’s establishment divided people into identifiable sectors – women, people of color, proponents of LGBTQ, etc. – those seen as victims of white oppressors. His fans, the so-called oppressors regardless of social position or economic status, love that he is nemesis to progressive politicians; to administrative lawyers who feed off government; to university professors and administrators who rely on public grants; to private sector union leaders (but not union members); to school boards who protect predators and approve schools dispensing tampons in boy’s bathrooms; to spoiled college students who want their student loans paid off; to a media enriched by political ads, and to those enthralled with a sense of their own virtue; and to an entertainment industry that lacks any moral sense.

Using data from Statista and OpenTheBooks, spending on federal elections (President, Senate and House) compounded annually at roughly 14% between 2000 and 2020, while government spending compounded at about 7.5% over that same time. However, over those same twenty years median household income only compounded at two percent. The consequence is that lower and middle-income families have been left behind, as government bureaucrats, bankers, and media people have grown fat. Has this increased spending helped the middle classes? Last week, The Connecticut Mirror reported that United Way estimates that 40% of Connecticut’s households faced poverty in 2022. Keep in mind, Connecticut ranks eight when states are measured by median household income. Also donors, be they individuals, corporations or unions, expect a return on their investment. Remember Solyndra, the California-based solar panel company that in September 2009 received $535 Million from President Obama’s Energy Department and two years later filed for bankruptcy.