CARACAS, Venezuela —  President Nicolás Maduro said he has ordered a 10-day block on access to X in Venezuela, accusing the owner Elon Musk of using the social network to promote hatred after…

Culture Walz of Sound What should we make of the Democratic vice presidential candidate’s now-controversial stereo setup? Credit: lev radin via Shutterstock In his short story, “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,” Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes trick two criminals into believing that he is playing the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s opera fantastique, The Tales of Hoffmann, on his violin in his chambers at 221B Baker Street. “Pray make yourself quite at home in my absence,” he instructs them. “Holmes,” we are told, “withdrew, picking up his violin from the corner as he passed. A few moments later the long-drawn, wailing notes of that most haunting of tunes came faintly through the closed door of the bedroom.” As they listen to the haunting strains of the solo, the thieves discuss their plans for a stolen gem, only to be astounded as the great detective himself rushes into the room and divulges that he was actually listening to their scheming. “These modern gramophones,” Holmes notes, “are a remarkable invention.” Indeed they are. It seems unlikely that Tim Walz was trying to ferret out reprobates when he set up a stereo, complete with an Audio-Technica LP60X-GM turntable and Denon receiver, for his daughter Hope, but his old tweet about it from December 6, 2020 is suddenly garnering a good deal of controversy. “Teaching Hope about old school stereo set ups,” Walz wrote. “We’re sharing the joy of classic vinyl and Bob Seger.” An accompanying photo shows him trimming the end of speaker wire so that he can attach it to the binding posts of a loudspeaker. He concluded his tweet by admonishing, “Quality speaker wire matters people!!!” A harmless tweet from a proud Papa introducing his daughter to the pleasures of analog sound? Not a bit of it. Now that Walz has been tapped by vice president Kamala Harris to become her running mate, his avidity for vinyl, not to mention his favorite stars (he signed a “Taylor Swift bill” earlier this year), is coming under forensic scrutiny. Is he a true exponent of timeless truths exemplified in his old school love for LPs? Or is he a feckless liberal do-gooder who should mind his own damn business?   To try and address the furor surrounding this question, it may be helpful to assess the nature of the criticisms being directed at Walz. One prominent source of concern has been the fact that Walz made bold to situate the audio gear on top of a radiator, which could lead to the warping of the precious vinyl. Another centers on his endorsement of Bob Seger. But the greatest ruckus appears to hover over Walz’s animadversions about loudspeaker cable. Two schools of thought quickly emerged. The first was discountenanced by what it saw as the prohibitive cost of the wire. “Let me guess,” wrote one respondent, “you’re one of those people that buys $300 speaker wire from Best Buy? Figures you would lie to us about wires like you lie to us about everything else, you tool.”  The very opposite concern, however, was sounded, as it were, by The American Conservative contributing editor Matthew Walther. Walther alleged that Walz was something of an audio imposter: “He’s using a piece of crap Denon receiver from Best Buy (he has it set to the DVD channel) and a $150 turntable with a built-in phono preamp arranged on top of a radiator. This is like Kamala talking about listening to Snoop Dogg in ‘college’ or Kerry wearing hunter orange.” The problem with Walz, then, isn’t that he’s a big-spending liberal. It’s that he’s a tightwad. Instead of buying the best, he went to Best Buy. Who has it right? Certainly Walz is to be commended for introducing his daughter to what amounts to a provisional step into the high-end stereo waters. The fact is that LPs are now outselling CDs, which are headed for the dust-bin of history, especially as digital streaming comes on strong. Written off when digital was first introduced in the late 1980s, vinyl is the comeback kid of the audio industry—some 43 million LPs were sold last year. The result has been to kick-start the turntable industry as well. You can buy a turntable for anywhere from under $149 to around $600,000. Some of the top high-end ‘tables include the Air Force Zero from Japan, the Oswald Mills K3 from Pennsylvania, and a new GMT One from Wilson-Benesch, which is located in Great Britain. This is why Walther has it right when he observes that Walz is a mere piker when it comes to the high-end. But it doesn’t exempt Walther from the charge of snobbery about lower-priced equipment—high fidelity, after all, is in the ear of the auditor.Maybe the most compelling argument on behalf of Walz, though, is one that should appeal to the former president Donald J. Trump. When I asked Michael Fremer, a turntable expert and a writer for the Absolute Sound, about the Walz audio brouhaha, he observed, “American-made hi-fi positively impacts our trade balance. Kudos to the Governor for encouraging domestic consumption of what the rest of the world recognizes among our most important cultural exports.” Indeed, two leading audio companies hail from Minnesota—the Magnepan corporation, which manufactures planar loudspeakers, and Audio Research Corporation, which builds tubed equipment.  If he and Harris waltz to victory in November, then they might ponder initiating a new Buy American campaign with gear from the Twin Cities for the White House sound system. The post Walz of Sound appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Bangladesh’s Affirmative Action Revolution The Western press has been conspicuously silent on why the southeast Asian country’s government was ousted. Credit: via Shutterstock Bangladesh is a country of 170 million that Americans rarely think about and, to the degree that they do, mostly associate with the manufacturer’s tags in t-shirts and blouses. This past week was the exception, when the longtime prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was chased out of the country by mobs that went on to loot the ministerial palace. As of this writing, the president and the chief of the army are working out what a provisional government is going to look like. The underlying cause of the riots hardly made it into the Western news, which preferred to focus on Hasina’s not-altogether-democratic style of rule and the botched repression of student protestors, which resulted in several deaths and heightened the crisis. This account fits neatly atop Western hobbyhorses about “authoritarianism,” but cuts out the more complicated, possibly (by liberal lights) embarrassing root problem: The demonstrators were protesting against affirmative action. Despite its off-and-on political instability, Bangladesh has grown steadily economically since gaining its independence from Pakistan in 1971. Under Hasina’s administration, the poverty rate has plummeted from 70 percent to under 45 percent. The growing middle class has done what middle classes everywhere have done—sent its children to school in hopes that they will take their places in the leading ranks of Bangladeshi society, which includes in large part the civil service. The problem: Historically, only between 20 percent and 50 percent of civil service jobs are allocated based solely on merit. The lion’s share is reserved for the descendants of veterans and war crime victims in Bangladesh’s war of independence, with a smaller portion also set aside for various favored minority groups. The quota system has persisted through the exertions of the executive despite various rulings modifying it in the Bangladeshi judiciary. The protestors’ initial slate of demands focused on reforming the quota system to allow more applicants from non-protected groups into the state service. Only after the police killed some of their number—an action for which the cops are now nervously asking immunity in whatever the post-Hasina settlement looks like—did the demonstrations reorient toward a single demand, the end of the Hasina government.  To the degree that the Western press has treated this at all, it has been to point out that the quota system allowed Hasina to reward her political cronies (because of certain historical accidents of the Bangladeshi party system that we need not get into here). That is true, as far as it goes. But the protestors weren’t pushing for an abolition of the quota system, but a reform—that is to say, their problem wasn’t that some of Hasina’s cronies were being hired in, but that the protestors’ own class were being disproportionately kept out. Completely absent, so far, has been any kind of self-reflection about all this, so here is a hot-wash examination. Almost all revolutions, in the final analysis, are bourgeois revolutions. A large class with significant capital that feels itself unduly excluded from the levers of power will make itself felt, peacefully or not. In our own history, the civil rights movement, so far from being the spontaneous uprising of the downtrodden that it is now fashionable to portray, was a highly organized operation spearheaded by lawyers, church leaders, and academics—the people with the wherewithal to pursue a legal and political playbook, and, perhaps more importantly, the people who were of a class to rankle at exclusion from elite institutions.  One of the core elements of the civil rights–era settlement was, ironically enough in 2024, race-based affirmative action, enacted by university administrators with liberal sensibilities and a fear of instability a la the Black Panthers’ 1970 occupation of Yale’s campus. This corrective measure has now grown unpopular; the use of race as a consideration in college admissions is opposed by a simple majority of Americans. A small but disproportionately capital-heavy segment of the population, Asian Americans, are disproportionately affected by the deemphasis on academic merit. Yet establishment interests in the state and the academy have a vested interest in perpetuating the affirmative-action regime as a way to invest their constituents with institutional and economic power. Recent court cases have attempted to address the perceived distortions of the affirmative-action regime, but the establishment has employed various dodges to make sure it continues all the same. We won’t belabor the point. The particular genius of liberal systems is allowing social mobility without violence; when this mobility is compromised, distorted, or curbed, the systems acquire the brittleness associated historically with aristocracies and oligarchies. The next thing you know, you are getting chased out of your living room and making for the nearest plane to New Delhi while the well-heeled children of shopkeepers and insurance agents howl for your blood. Bangladesh furnishes an extreme case study of what an unpopular quota system can set off. Will we learn the lesson? The post Bangladesh’s Affirmative Action Revolution appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs What Would a Trump II Taiwan Policy Look Like? Critics of the former president’s “abandonment” of the Republic of China fundamentally misunderstand his foreign policy. Credit: via Shutterstock Some political observers in the U.S. believe that Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has essentially adopted a negative, oppositional attitude toward Taiwan in recent months. “Trump Is Giving Taiwan the Ukraine Treatment” ran the headline in Foreign Policy in late July after Trump gave an interview in which he charged that Taiwan “doesn’t give us anything” and has taken “about 100 percent of our chip business.” He said that Taiwan “should pay us for [its] defense” and refused to voice an unequivocal commitment that America would defend Taiwan if the island were attacked or invaded by mainland China. Coming in the wake of the Republican policy platform adopted in mid-July, which did not include a specific statement regarding the fate of Taiwan, critics of Trump (and even some supporters and loyalists) voiced worry that his commitment to Taiwan may have weakened in recent months. The party platform’s silence on Taiwan represented a notable departure from previous platforms, which explicitly announced that a Trump administration would come to the aid of Taiwan if anything threatened to change in its present status. Why the change? Even if Taiwan is not going to receive “the Ukraine treatment,” is a Trump presidency going to give the island “the Hong Kong treatment,” leaving it to the mercy of Beijing? In late April, just weeks before Trump’s statements on Taiwan, Nikkei Asia reported that Asia experts predict that a mainland invasion or violation of Taiwan territorial space will occur no later than 2027—that is, during the term of the next American president. Such reports have heightened fears about Trump’s interview remarks.  It warrants emphasis, however, that even though Trump’s critics have been proclaiming that he is set to abandon Taiwan and turn the island over to the Chinese Communist Party, other explanations are equally or more plausible.  First, Trump has always taken what is described as a “transactional” approach to foreign policy. Trump is above all a businessman who casts himself explicitly as a dealmaker. That view is the essential foundation of his “America First” foreign policy. From this vantage point, he is not “abandoning” Taiwan, but rather recalibrating the relationship. He wants Taiwan to pay more for American help as well as to loosen its hold on its microchip monopoly.  Trump’s transactional approach to Taiwan is at odds with the convictions of the China hawks who had counseled him during his first administration, such as National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The middle ranks were also dominated by hawkish advisors (and strong advocates for Taiwan), such as Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger; Randall Schriver, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, and Peter Navarro, head of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. Here is the second reason why it is premature to jump to conclusions that Trump is “abandoning” Taiwan. In the last four years, Trump has increasingly insisted on “being his own man” on foreign policy and surrounding himself with advisors who fully support his “America First” outlook. The policy statements on Taiwan in the first two Republican Party platforms were shaped by his advisors, particularly China hawks. His present position seems much closer to the “strategic ambiguity” position historically favored by many, if not most, American policymakers. Trump acknowledged as much when he was asked what he would specifically do in the event of a hostile move by mainland China toward Taiwan.  “I wouldn’t want to give away any negotiating abilities by giving information like that to any reporter,” he replied. Third, any comparisons between Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine and Taiwan are misconceived. The U.S. has not poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Taiwan, nor is the U.S. propping up a war for which the U.S. pays with comparatively support financially from Europe. Likewise, Ukraine has not traditionally been an important U.S. ally, nor has it held for many decades a critical strategic interest geopolitically for the U.S. Trump, therefore, is not “giving Taiwan the Ukraine treatment,” but rather insisting that he will no longer turn a blind eye toward what he considers a long-standing “Taiwan First” policy in which—as he sees it—the U.S. has supported Taiwan without sufficient consideration for American economic interests. Indeed, if anything, Trump’s position on Ukraine would suggest that he strongly supports Taiwan. “We need to bring this [war] to a rapid close,” he has said about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, “so America can focus on the real issue, which is China.” Supporters of Trump’s “recalibration” on Taiwan note that, from the beginning to the end of his presidential administration, he demonstrated both symbolically and by concrete action how he will likely behave if he regains power. For instance, just as he was about to take office, president-elect Trump made an unprecedented, widely reported phone call in December 2016 to the newly elected president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, the first time in 37 years that an American president (or president-elect) had spoken with the Taiwanese president. Trump cultivated close relations with Taiwan throughout his administration, and at the end of his presidency, in October 2020, he arranged a large arms sale of $1.8 billion to Taiwan, including high-technology missile and launcher systems. That same week, China retaliated by imposing severe sanctions on U.S. arms manufacturers, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, in order to pressure Trump to reverse course and cancel the proposed weapons sale to Taiwan. Not only did he refuse to do so, he went even further in the weeks that followed, canceling all restrictions on direct communication with Taiwan. The people of Taiwan have long been strong supporters of Donald Trump—and vice versa, as his phone call to President Tsai before taking office evinced, along with his decision four years later to lift all barriers on official communication with Taiwan (which have since been reinstated by the Biden administration). Having lived in Taiwan, lectured at the National Academy of the Humanities in Taipei, and taught foreign languages in one of the leading universities there—in Tunghai, the third largest city of Taiwan—I have long been struck by the overwhelming enthusiasm of most citizens of the island for Trump. This occurs even at the universities and among other elites. In the U.S., you will not find a department in the liberal arts at any major university that is not intensely hostile to Trump, giving him no more than 5 or 10 percent support. In Taiwan, it is exactly the opposite: A majority of the citizenry voices support for Trump. Obviously, this has to do with his frank and frequent criticism of mainland China—but also his willingness to take daring risks, as both the phone call to President Tsai and the large weapons package in 2020 demonstrated.  That solid relationship between Trump and Taiwan has not dissolved in the wake of a mere interview in which Trump voiced a few critical comments about U.S.-Taiwanese relations. In fact, his selection of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential running mate—who is another vocal critic of China and a sympathetic supporter of Taiwan—only serves to reinforce that relationship. Moreover, Trump’s advisors were quick to point out that Trump, when he made these casual comments during the July interview, was probably not fully informed about the fact that Taiwan is presently paying for most of its weapons imports from U.S. companies. Furthermore, they note, it was overlooked by his critics that Trump voiced strong admiration for the citizens of Taiwan in the interview. “I know the people [of Taiwan] very well, respect them greatly.” That was the context, he made clear, for his observations that Taiwan had taken “about 100 percent of our chip business”—he admired the enterprise of the Taiwan people. Still, he said, it was time to balance the relationship away from what I am calling America’s willingness to grant a “Taiwan First” policy.  My own view is that the best indicator of Trump’s actions regarding Taiwan in a second presidential term is Trump’s record in his first term of office. Although his thinking is no longer dominated by a group of outspoken China critics, he remains a vociferous critic of mainland China and an admirer of Taiwan and its people. The post What Would a Trump II Taiwan Policy Look Like? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The following article, Oh HELL No! Tyrannical UK Prosecutors Threaten To Police Speech Globally, Extradite Anyone On The Planet Who Criticizes Mass Migration, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. (Natural News) Prosecutors in the United Kingdom (UK) are looking to hunt down anyone who criticizes their mass migration policies that have resulted in increased violence across Great Britain. This totalitarian effort to suppress speech on a global level includes threats of extradition against individuals who speak out about the wave of criminality coming from migrants. Right … Continue reading Oh HELL No! Tyrannical UK Prosecutors Threaten To Police Speech Globally, Extradite Anyone On The Planet Who Criticizes Mass Migration ...

‘….organised crime, secret services, corporate power, the deep state….they’re investing massive amounts of money in manipulating us…’ This week Neil talks power & corruption with the brilliant and forensically detailed investigative journalist Whitney Webb. To help support this podcast & get extra, exclusive content every week sign up to Neil Oliver on Patreon.com https://www.patreon.com/neiloliver Neil Oliver Website: https://www.neiloliver.com Whitney Webb, Neil’s guest, Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She is contributing editor of Unlimited Hangout and the author of the book One Nation Under Blackmail. You can find Whitney's work at https://unlimitedhangout.com and support her at https://unlimitedhangout.com/join. Neil Oliver Shop - check out my t-shirts, mugs & other channel merchandise: https://neil-oliver.creator-spring.com Neil Oliver Instagram - NeilOliverLoveLetter: https://www.instagram.com/neiloliverloveletter Neil Oliver Podcasts: Season 1: Neil Oliver's Love Letter To The British Isles Season 2: Neil Oliver's Love Letter To The World Available on all the usual providers https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/neil-olivers-love-letter-to-the-british-isles #NeilOliver #WhitneyWebb #OrganisedCrime #Italianmafia #JewishMob #America #US #Corporatism #CIA #FBI #Trump #KierStamer #history #neiloliverGBNews #travel #culture #ancient #historyfact #explore

On August 8, 2024, R A W S A L E R T S @rawsalerts writes: "#BREAKING: Brandon New body camera footage shows police confronting Trump gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks before he opened fire from a rooftop. Watch as brand new bodycam footage has been released, showing a police officer being lifted to the roof of the AGR building, where a man, later identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, shot at former President Donald Trump during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The footage captures the moment when an officer from the Butler Township Police Department attempted to reach the roof, where the suspected gunman was located. Another officer assisted in lifting him after rally attendees alerted the police to an individual on the roof near the rally site where Trump was scheduled to speak. Officers described Crooks as having glasses, long hair, a backpack, and an AR-15 rifle. After Crooks was taken out by a Secret Service Countersniper team, there was confusion on why the roof where Crooks was perched was unmanned. Source: https://x.com/rawsalerts/status/1821644337274343746 ................... Police Release New Bodycam Footage From Trump Shooting, Showing Rooftop Incident The new bodycamera footage was released by the Butler County Police Department shows the officer who confronted the shooter. By Jack Phillips The Epoch Times August 8, 2024 https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/pennsylvania-police-release-new-bodycam-footage-from-trump-assassination-attempt-5702212 Bodycam footage from a local Pennsylvania officer who tried to get on the roof where a man shot at former President Donald Trump last month was released on Thursday. The footage shows the moment an officer with the Butler Township Police Department tried to get on the roof of a building where suspected gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks was perched. Another officer helped lift the responding officer to the roof after rally attendees alerted police that there was an individual on the roof near the rally where Trump was set to speak. In the clip, an officer is seen moving toward a building before another officer tries to hoist him onto the roof. The officer is then seen trying to climb onto the building before he drops down. Only officers' hands are seen as he tries to get onto the roof in the video, which does not show Crooks. Butler Township Police Department Lt. Matthew Pearson last month told a local Pennsylvania news outlet that the officer was not able to draw his firearm because he was holding onto the building. And Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe told the New York Post last month that the officers who interrupted Crooks may have distracted the shooter before he shot at the former president, hitting him in the ear. "If I'm interrupted, and I move my gun, you are going to have to reassess that whole situation at this point, so yes, you can make a case that those two officers saved the president's life," Slupe told the paper.

"I've got him!" The post Nadine Shah on working with John Cale: “I was so excited but also terrified” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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.