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Five Quick Things: Is Trump Suffering From the Assassin’s Veto?
He has a rally planned in Montana tonight, and yesterday he held a press conference of more than an hour — something Kamala Harris isn’t capable of doing — so it’s not like Donald Trump is hiding.
But there are lots of Trump supporters griping that his campaign has gone into something the media is billing as hibernation in the nearly three weeks since Harris was anointed by the Democrats’ hidden Politburo as their replacement candidate for Joe Biden.
Then there was that outing in Georgia a few days back during which Trump ripped into that state’s popular GOP governor, Brian Kemp, over the 2020 election and the irregularities that happened in Georgia back then. Regardless of the accuracy of those claims, that was a violation of the “time and place” rule.
The narrative, accurate or not, is now that Trump is off his game.
An assessment of those gripes, and other items percolating on the campaign trail, dominates this week’s version of the Five Quick Things.
1. Something Worse Than the Heckler’s Veto?
The investigation into what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, almost a month ago has been more or less pushed completely out of the headlines by the media’s Kamalagasm and the rocky rollout of her creeptastic VP choice, and that’s a real shame.
Because the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler last month turns out to be one of the worst scandals in American history.
Yes, we’re racking up lots of those lately. That’s what civilizational decline looks like.
But the upshot of the investigation, as conducted by Congress and in other venues, reveals that the Secret Service has been utterly politicized under the direction of the deposed Kimberly Cheatle and driven to a level of performance that, frankly, doesn’t come off like mere incompetence.
The Secret Service left a glaring weakness in its security profile on that rooftop that Thomas Crooks settled on in full view of anyone paying attention, put Trump on stage with a target on his temple, did nothing until the hand of God miraculously saved Trump from the assassin’s bullet, and in the aftermath informed the candidate that it couldn’t secure his outdoor rallies.
Which is why I wrote in a previous column that Trump ought to do what his fictional doppleganger Donny Trumbull did in my novel King of the Jungle (which you should go and purchase at Amazon right now) — namely, fire the Secret Service and go fully private sector with his security profile.
Then we find out the Iranians are trying to assassinate him, and an Iranian-backed Pakistani was arrested while plotting to kill Trump.
It’s almost certain that he’s in the crosshairs not just of foreign bad guys, but of unhinged crazies as well. Which is nothing particularly new, of course; that sadly comes with the territory if you’re a presidential candidate.
But it’s worse in Trump’s case, because now it’s unmistakable that the Secret Service is at best all but useless as a security force around him, if not an active threat to him given the suspicious incompetence in Butler.
He’s nonetheless done events since, and tonight in Montana is likely to be a big show. But this week has been awfully low-key, and the media’s Kamalagasm has gone mostly unrefuted by the campaign.
I’m wondering if Team Trump is reeling slightly not because they were unprepared for the shift to Harris — nothing about the Kamalagasm was even remotely surprising, though it’s perhaps more brazen than anything else we’ve ever seen — but because he can’t count on his standard-issue security coverage not to get him killed.
The Left is on social media and their propaganda networks braying that “Trump is afraid.” Well, maybe you’re right. You had somebody shoot the man and then you made it clear to him it can happen again. He happens to be sane; maybe it’s not surprising that he’s taking a beat to figure out how to go forward.
2. On the Other Hand, JD Vance Turns Out to Be a Dude
By “dude,” I don’t mean a “White Dudes For Harris” dude. In usage as a sports term, a dude is a star player. As in, Paul Skenes is a dude on the mound.
And Vance is a dude on the campaign trail.
He’s far and away the best orator of the four people on the major-party presidential tickets. Vance’s takedown of Kamala Harris on the issue of loyalty was brilliant…
But Vance is also a rather plucky pol as well. On Wednesday, it happened that his plane was parked on the tarmac at the little airport in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, just a short walk from where Harris’ plane was, and so Vance did this…
For his trouble, the online Left has accused him of “stalking” Harris…
If this is the best the hive-mind can come up with, I’m not sure they’re gonna sustain whatever momentum they think they have. https://t.co/bBmWCqtP7b
— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) August 8, 2024
…which is very, very strange.
A bit below, we’re going to dive into what underlies such a bizarre take on Vance’s foray into Harris’ camp, but it’s clear that he unnerved Team Kamala by doing something unscripted, that — to make things worse — brought attention to the fact that she won’t debate, hold town halls, or do interviews.
Vance is interrupting the Left’s narratives, and all they can do is call him names.
He’s a lot sharper than previous veep candidates on GOP tickets like Mike Pence and Dan Quayle. He’s turning into a wild card, and if all they can do with him is call him “weird,” it might make him a decisive asset for Trump.
Of course, the VP will not make or break a ticket. It has to be Trump posting the W’s.
3. There Are Cracks in the Kamalagasm, You Know
You almost certainly saw this…
Pro-Palestine protesters just disrupted Kamala’s speech in Michigan.
Her response: “If you want Donald Trump to win say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” pic.twitter.com/Mf0CdEbDQg
— Read No Shortcuts (@JoshuaPHilll) August 8, 2024
That’s not a win. It’s an example of a semi-scripted moment for Harris, and the semi-scripted ones aren’t much better than the unscripted ones.
Giving the Angry Black Woman glare to the pro-Hamas hecklers in Michigan is an even bigger own goal than Trump’s tirade about Kemp in Georgia. The vast majority of GOP voters in the Peach State already know that Trump and Kemp don’t get along and don’t really care; they get irritated when Trump picks at that scab and would just like to see everybody shut up and pretend to get along.
But the pro-Hamas crowd? These are people who aren’t all that invested in American democracy in the first place, who think the Biden administration — which includes Harris — has sold them out for Jewish money, who are still angry at the mere idea that Harris might have chosen a Jew (Josh Shapiro) for her running mate, and who believe in a messianic Palestinian cause. Some of them are Arabs in places like Dearborn, whose votes Harris has to have or else she’s going to lose that state, and others are the indoctrinated communist Left who see the Israel–Gaza conflict as a flashpoint in a global anticolonialist struggle they demand Harris be on their side of.
These people are Harris’ base voters. She’s in something of a bind here — she needs to turn them out or she’s going to lose in all these swing states, but she can’t pander too heavily to them or else she’ll put a ceiling on her electability.
And while you can certainly overstate the impact of a VP pick, Tim Walz looks like a growing albatross around Harris’ neck.
They’re trying to sell Walz as a Midwestern dad avatar, but there are sooo many problems with that.
You already know about the Stolen Valor piece where Walz is concerned, and that’s a hook Team Harris hasn’t figured out how to wriggle him off of. Walz’s demotion following his quitting of the Minnesota National Guard before completing the requirements to be an E-9, or Command Sergeant Major, is something he didn’t acknowledge. Then there’s the Tampon Tim problem, which doesn’t get resolved by asking, as many on the left are trying to do, “what’s the harm” in putting tampon dispensers in BOYS’ bathrooms in all of Minnesota’s schools. There’s the China problem with Walz, which we’ll have to fully address in one of next week’s columns. There’s the “trans sanctuary” issue, and Walz’s further signing of a bill that removed the specific barring of pedophiles as a category of LGBTQ lifestyles recognized by the state.
And there’s the COVID lockdown issue, including Walz’s “snitch line” allowing petty neighborhood tyrants to report their fellow man for such atrocities as not wearing a mask or playing outside with their kids. And the $250 million in fraud from his idiotic Feed Our Future program, one of the worst scandals of the entire COVID fiasco. Walz also was guilty of killing his senior citizens by dumping COVID patients into nursing homes.
And, of course, the George Floyd riots he fueled and then played Nero as Minneapolis burned.
Walz’s honeymoon lasted about 36 hours, and then all of these things began to surface. The response as each of them popped in news reports has been bluster and indignation from Team Harris, which simply isn’t going to cut it. These things have to be calmly and thoroughly refuted, and it’s obvious they can’t do that.
So no, this race has by no means tipped. Give it two weeks, and the Good Ship Kamala will begin to list.
4. The D+37 Factor
You’ve seen this column talk again and again about those four most dispositive numbers in American society, but I’ll recite them again: based on exit polling from the 2022 elections, married men are R+20, meaning they vote Republican 20 percentage points more than Democrat, married women are R+14, unmarried men are R+7, and unmarried women are D+37.
I’ve taken the position that D+37 number underlies practically everything not just in American politics but in culture and even economics. With the Left in control of practically every cultural and political institution we have, there is a palpable, obvious effort afoot not just to solidify that D+37 constituency but to grow it.
Meaning, to create as many single women as possible and to keep them in that D+37 mindset.
This might be the only time you’ll ever see this column link to an article in the Guardian, but this piece is about Gen Z, and it talks about how young women are the most “progressive” contingent in American society while their male counterparts skew far more conservative than other generations’ men at the same age.
The issue being, further, that the young women are much more politically inclined while the men are mostly checked out.
And of course the young men are checked out. They’re treated with suspicion growing up in schools that are totally dominated by the D+37 crowd — that’s who runs public education in America, after all. They’re informed by the culture time and again that their masculinity is “toxic” or otherwise undesirable. For many of them, if this is the society they’re in, why bother getting involved?
Alternatively, if you’re young, you probably shouldn’t be all that political. Your focus is better directed inward — at forming correct habits, at maximizing your personal development, and so on. Maybe the issue here is that too many young women are being indoctrinated into leftist feminist politics — and those institutions pushing the D+37 mindset on women simply don’t have anything to offer to the young men.
Having said all of the above, let’s go back to JD Vance on that tarmac. Saying that he’s “stalking” Kamala Harris is absurd, right? He’s doing a bit of an aggressive earned media stunt and pointing out her refusal or inability to engage in unscripted interactions on the campaign trail.
But who do you think that kind of messaging works on?
Women who have been programmed to fear men. Single women whose mindset — a mindset that has been handed to them courtesy of all of our cultural and political institutions the Left controls — will prevent them from having productive relationships with men.
That Vance has already made news criticizing that mindset only lends power to this framing.
And of course this has to be done, because he’s the young and physically attractive man of the three on the ticket. If JD Vance was a Democrat, they’d be selling him as the All-American heartthrob. Instead, he’s “weird” and a “stalker” while Walz gets away with coddling pedophiles and transing kids in Minnesota.
The point is that there is more than just the usual campaign checkers going on here. This is programming and conditioning. Don’t look at Vance, and by all means don’t listen to what he says. He’s “weird,” and a “stalker,” and all the other cancel culture names we can throw at him.
It goes without saying that this is absolutely cancerous to a society, but they’re clearly invested in it. And once you’ve seen this stuff in action, you cannot unsee it. It’s literally everywhere you look.
5. Elon Kills GARM; Google Hit With Monopoly Designation
You probably saw both of these two things, but online free speech has had a really good week. That’s an awfully nice change after what feels like a long and mostly endless retreat.
First, in a court case filed, amazingly, by the Department of Justice, Google was declared a monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act:
A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” according to the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”
Judge Amit Mehta’s decision represents a major victory for the Department of Justice, which accused Google of illegally monopolizing the online search market. Still, Mehta did not agree with all of the government’s arguments. For example, he rejected the claim that Google has monopoly power in one specific part of the ads market. He agreed with the government, however, that Google has a monopoly in “general search services” and “general search text advertising.”
This is a big deal, and a few days ago, Ace of Spades, who as an independent conservative media proprietor is precisely within the main class of victims of this rancid monopoly’s market manipulations, explained why:
People who repeat the Zombie Talking Point that “monopolies are transitory because competitors always rise up” stupidly ignore the fact that Google is paying other companies to make its offering the default option.
And when, exactly, will these competitors “rise up” and displace Google? In sixty f**king years? Maybe 100? Maybe 300?
What are people, like me, supposed to do for sixty f**king years as Google uses its monopoly to deny traffic to my business? Shall I just quote happily from Adam Smith and babble about “the Invisible Hand” coming to rescue me in 60 years as I go bankrupt?
The market tends to move a little more quickly when people with very large war chests begin to play. Elon Musk, for example, decided he’d had enough of another rancid monopoly’s market manipulations that were draining his revenues for X and promptly made this happen:
An influential advertising industry group said it would shut down after being sued this week by X, Elon Musk’s social media company, according to an email sent to its members and obtained by The New York Times.
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a nonprofit coalition of major advertisers led by the World Federation of Advertisers, told its members it would cease operations two days after Mr. Musk accused the group of orchestrating a boycott against X. The lawsuit claimed that the group, known as GARM, had violated antitrust laws by coordinating with brands to dissuade them from spending money on the social media platform.
While the World Federation of Advertisers denied that GARM’s work had run afoul of the law, it said that the nonprofit did not have the financial resources to continue operating while it fights X in court.
Stephan Loerke, the chief executive of the World Federation of Advertisers, told members in an email that, while he was “confident that the outcome will demonstrate our full adherence to competition rules in all our activities,” GARM would shut down its operations immediately. The World Federation of Advertisers, which is also named in the lawsuit, will remain operational.
…
At X, the news that GARM would shut down was celebrated. “No small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized,” Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, said in a post. “This is an important acknowledgment and a necessary step in the right direction. I am hopeful that it means ecosystem-wide reform is coming.”
And there it is. A hopeful note to end the week.
It’s likely too much to ask that Google be broken up like Standard Oil or Ma Bell were, or to expect that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media won’t just melt away into something more shadowy and efficiently sinister. But at the very minimum both have suffered setbacks, without which the war to restore the internet as free cannot be won.
The post Five Quick Things: Is Trump Suffering From the Assassin’s Veto? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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