Coming soon to your town.

One of the fact-check moments in last week’s debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris occurred when Trump talked about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

ABC moderator David Muir was quick to challenge Trump’s assertion (even though that wasn’t Muir’s job) while Kamala Harris stood by making a grand show of derisive laughter.

I wish Trump hadn’t gone there. His raising of the topic was an unforced error. Whether Haitian migrants are eating the domesticated pets of Springfield or not (disgusting as that is) isn’t really the point.

The point is that there is exactly zero chance that Haitian migrants could eat the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio if the Haitian migrants weren’t there in the first place.

Trump’s casting of the problem in terms of migrant carnism served only to validate the criticisms of the media and of Trump haters while letting Harris off the hook for the knowable consequences attendant to airlifting thousands of poor, unvetted migrants into a small town in the heartland. The problems now on display in Springfield are a manifestation of a much larger humanitarian problem that was intentionally created by the administration in which Kamala Harris currently serves.

A much more pertinent angle – and thus an angle never explored by the two partisan hacks from ABC that were “moderating” the debate – is how the Biden administration justifies dropping 20,000 unvetted migrants into a community of just 58,000.

There’s no dismissing that with derisive laughter. There’s no need for a David Muir “fact check.” The fact isn’t disputed.

Imagine if you woke up one morning to find that one of every four people living in your town was poor, unemployed, unable to speak the language, untethered to the norms and customs of your community and completely dependent upon your tax money for the necessities of life?

What if suddenly the number of students in your kid’s already overburdened classroom expanded by a third – and none of them spoke English?

New York City mayor Eric Adams never misses an opportunity to tell you that his city is being pushed to its limits under the strain of feeding and housing 67,000 illegal migrants. What if it were four million, the number in Springfield, OH scaled up to the native population of New York? How loudly would Eric Adams be squealing then?

It isn’t about eating dogs and cats. It’s about the fact that no nation that wants to call itself sovereign can permit millions of people to come in unvetted with no thought given as to the impact.

The simple truth is that Kamala Harris couldn’t care less about the problems that 20,000 Haitian migrants have visited upon Springfield, OH. Neither could David Muir. Muir and Harris care only about electing Harris.

But you and I and every sane person you know should care. Because the consequences of Biden administration immigration policy now being felt in Springfield, Ohio are coming to communities across the country if Kamala Harris wins the election.

Appalling.

One of the most appalling things to happen in this appalling chapter in American politics is that former vice president Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Kamala Harris, despite her current efforts to hide the fact, is a radical, far-left San Francisco liberal. She is by an order of magnitude the most far-left candidate the Democratic Party has ever nominated.

How a guy who was vice president in a Republican administration and who was one of the earliest endorsers of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy for president could endorse Kamala Harris seems to defy understanding.

But look a little deeper and understanding begins to emerge.

Save for the four and a half years during which he was chairman and CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney spent his entire career in the elite circles of official Washington. Dick Cheney is a part of the Washington establishment that managed – irrespective of which party was momentarily in charge – to put the nation $35 trillion in debt while concurrently diminishing the personal wealth of average Americans.

The term “average Americans” for this discussion is defined as the 160-plus million people who live between the coasts, get up and go to work every day, raise their children, and pay their taxes. This is the pool from which Donald Trump draws the lion’s share of his support.

By 2016, disgust among these voters with establishment Washington was sufficient to give rise to Trump’s otherwise improbable presidency. In this space in November 2022, I wrote this:

We’ve been led for decades by a small, inbred group of elitist Ivy Leaguers and they have made a pig’s breakfast of it. By this time in its history the United States should be substantially debt free, economically strong, and well-capable of deterring the world’s bad actors.

Racial animus in America should be on the wane.

Prosperity should be making its way through every demographic group in the country. Today’s generation of black and Hispanic parents should be approaching their old age secure in the knowledge that their children will be better off than they were.

Today, none of those things is true.

Trump’s arrival caused the scales to fall from the eyes of people like you and me who once were excited about a guy like Mitt Romney. (How the hell were we ever excited about Mitt Romney?) Trump brought long overdue clarity. We owe him for that.”

Though I admit to being blind to it during his time as VP, Cheney is the embodiment of the disdain expressed in the preceding paragraphs. His fealty to the customs and niceties of establishment Washington now exceeds any fealty to conservative governance he might have once had.

Cheney can support whomever he wants. It’s a free country. But his public endorsement of Kamala Harris is a slap in the face to the good people who once supported him and who valiantly defended him against the same vile, truth-starved slander that is now routinely visited upon Donald Trump by Democrats and their media handmaidens.

Cheney should be ashamed.

Don’t be confused about Nov 5.

There is confusion as to what is on the ballot on November 5. Note that I said, “what,” and not, “who.”

That’s because it’s really not about “who.”

Boiled all the way down, this is not a contest between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. It’s not even a contest between two political parties. And it goes well beyond such things as tax policy, fiscal policy and national defense.

The 2024 election is a contest between two governing visions for this 235-year-old republic – two governing visions that have seldom in our history been more divergent.

On the one hand, you have the governing vision that animated the Founding Fathers. That vision is one of a government that is tightly circumscribed. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was at times highly contentious. The Founders at various times during that sweltering summer in Philadelphia argued bitterly. But the arguments sprang from a commonly held conviction. The Founders were unanimous in their belief that government by its very nature tends toward tyranny and that government is, therefore, no better than a necessary evil.

Our founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – were both written by men who understood that when humans are given power over other humans, that power will be abused. So, they sought to give government only the bare minimum power necessary to defend the peace, support the currency and act as an impartial referee in the conduct of commerce.

Our founding documents fairly scream with distrust of concentrated power. The three co-equal branches of our federal government about which you and I learned in high school but about which a distressing number of college students know little today, exist for the express purpose of limiting each other and thereby limiting the reach and power of government.

Our Founders – who suffered the tyrannies large and small of a far-away King George III – sought to push government downward and away from centralization. It is easier to hold to account a locally elected constable or alderman that it is to hold to account a far-off potentate.

That concern about a potentate is why, when you read your Constitutional history, you find that the Founders struggled most with Article II of the Constitution – the presidency – than they did with any of the six other articles.

The grand vision of our Founders – as it is embodied in our Constitution – is that the federal government should have only a small impact on daily life. Their vision was that free citizens of sovereign states would be at maximum liberty to order their lives and arrange their affairs as they, themselves, believed to be best.

The Founders also believed that with respect to the power of government, the closer to home it is kept the easier it is to keep that power in check. That belief animated every discussion that involved any surrender of rights by the 13 original individual states.

That’s the vision in which I believe and it’s the vision that animates small-government Republicans. It is the vision that led President Trump in his first term to aggressively eliminate regulations that have piled up over decades of the federal government being allowed to grow beyond the bounds of the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.

That’s one side of the ballot.

The other side of the ballot, the one embraced by a rapidly increasing proportion of Democrats, seeks to bring about the perfection of society via top-down control. It’s a governing vision in which a relatively small cabal of elite and enlightened “experts” exercises extensive control over the daily lives of less enlightened citizens via the mechanisms of extensive legislation and regulation overseen by a sprawling federal bureaucracy.

That governing vision has the federal government dictating for our own good how, when and from whom we obtain our health care. It has the government dictating how many and what kind of vehicles we may drive and where we may drive them. It has the government possessed of the capacity to set our thermostats from afar to control our use of energy in our homes.

Speaking of homes, it is the ultimate vision of many big-government progressives that we abandon the conceit of individual ownership of spacious homes on spacious lots of our own choosing. Instead, we are to adopt collectivist living in concentrated government-planned and managed housing located close to city centers.

By concentrating us in close, government-overseen housing, we might more easily be coerced out of our private vehicles. Statist progressives want us walking to work, walking to the store, and walking our kids to school. Where walking isn’t practical, we are to use public transit. All this so that our use of private vehicles might be reduced or outright eliminated.

The governing vision of far-left progressives is that the federal government will have power over us down to what and how much we eat. An example of this can already be seen in the progressive-led jihad on beef and cattle ranching that has been underway for years.

Total control of public education is at the very heart of the leftist governing vision. Government as envisioned by the statists on the left will dictate to us what our children may be taught in the schools that we pay for and, equally important, what may not be taught in those schools. Parental input regarding the education of children will be neither sought nor suffered. In the perfect world of big-government progressives, private education will be done away with altogether so that the government might have ultimate control of what our children are taught and what they grow up believing.

This governing vision of education dovetails into a statist belief that rather than having the primary say as to how we raise our children, we should instead be de facto agents of the government in that endeavor.

These are the governing visions of the other side of the ballot.

Which means that rather than just choosing between two candidates, we are instead at an inflection point in our political history.

Not in yours and my lifetimes have the two parties been more divergent in what they believe and what they intend to do if elected.

For most of my life, Democrats and Republicans have largely agreed on the big things. We have largely agreed on our basic freedoms. We have largely agreed that America is basically good. We have largely agreed that the best way to raise children is in a household containing a man and a woman with a lifetime commitment to one another via marriage.

We have largely agreed that the government should stay out of our business.

We have largely agreed on the need for a strong, vibrant and capable military with a primary mission of deterring the ambitions of bad guys around the world.

We have largely agreed that men and women as created by God are fundamentally different and that those differences are intended by God to complement one another.

For most of our lives, Democrats and Republicans may have disagreed as to the what the preacher was trying to say in the sermon, but they nevertheless all sang from the same hymnal.

That is now coming undone.

Kamala Harris is the product of a Democratic Party that has gone far, far to the left. To understand what that means in practical terms, you need only look at the physical, spiritual and moral breakdown in major American cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis and others under their current Democratic Party leaders.

So, this election season, don’t be confused even as people try to confuse you.

You’re not choosing between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Each of them is merely a proxy. The real contest is between the original vision of the drafters of our Constitution; and a vision of our nation as informed by the writings and beliefs of the likes of Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky.

So, don’t get hung up on Kamala Harris’s idiotic ramblings or her stupid cackle. Don’t get hung up on Donald Trump’s “mean tweets” and verbal wild pitches.

It’s about choosing between the country of freedom and individual liberty that we inherited from our parents and grandparents, or a country administered by a small group of elites exercising top-down control over every aspect of our lives.

It’s certainly not about how either candidate makes you “feel.”

It’s all up to him.

Less than 40 days ago, Democrats were ruefully referring to Kamala Harris as “Biden’s insurance policy,” meaning that a clearly deficient Joe Biden was being protected by aversion to his obvious successor – a woman of scant accomplishment plagued by a penchant for nonsensical verbal diarrhea.

That was then.

Today, less than six weeks later, Ms. Harris is the Democratic nominee for president, is fresh off the convention in Chicago at which she was heralded as the finest candidate since the transcendence of Barack Obama, and is gaining in the polls. She has a credible shot at becoming president without having been subjected to the crucible of the primary election process. She is the first politician of the modern era to become a major party nominee for president without having received even a single vote in a state primary election.

Since her anointment, Ms. Harris has been floating on a puffy cloud of media adoration. If she becomes president, she will have done so with less effort than any president in American history, except perhaps for George Washington, who was elected by acclamation.

Though we can’t foretell the future, it is still safe to say that the media will be at pains to avoid challenging Ms. Harris in any way that might damage her chances against Orange Man. At this writing, she has successfully avoided unscripted events, press conferences and one-on-one media interviews save for one pre-taped interview with CNN’s Dana Bash (to which she brought a wingman). As the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger explains it, Kamala Harris is “the biggest soap bubble American politics has ever seen.” Only contact with a hard surface can keep her from “floating into office.”

The media has no intention of popping the bubble. In the absence of the vetting that a properly functioning fourth estate is supposed to provide, the only thing standing between Kamala Harris and the Oval Office is Donald Trump.

That fact has Republicans and conservatives biting their nails.

It can be argued that the 2024 presidential election is Trump’s election to lose, and it can be simultaneously argued that Trump is quite capable of bringing that loss about.

It’s all up to him.

If Trump will stick to the issues and avoid the distractions that plagued his previous campaigns, he will defeat Kamala Harris.

If he will stay disciplined and avoid being baited into sophomoric social media rants, he will win.

If he will mount a fact-based challenge to Ms. Harris’s well documented hard-left policy positions (from which she is now attempting to distance herself), and properly connect her to a deeply unpopular Biden administration, he will win.

If he can show independent voters that he has gained strength from his successes and wisdom from his mistakes, he will win.

If Trump can get voters to recall what it was like buying groceries, filling the tank, and paying rent when he was president, he will win.

But, if Lord help us, we get the Donald Trump of 2020, Kamala Harris becomes president.

It’s not about either of them.

(CHICAGO) I have spent this entire week at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and I have heard speech after speech praising Kamala Harris as something akin to the second coming and I have heard speech after speech calling Donald Trump everything but a child of God.

Here’s the truth. Kamala Harris isn’t all that and neither is Donald Trump. Both are human and both are flawed.

I don’t hate Kamala Harris. I’m not in the tank for Donald Trump.

I’m in the tank for the country.

My politics are animated by my desire for the United States to continue to be the “Shining City on a Hill,” as Ronald Reagan so eloquently characterized her in his farewell address to the nation.

I love this country. I cannot know how my life would have played out if I had been born somewhere else. What I know is that the freedom and opportunity that were my birthright for having been born here have allowed me to live a life for which I am more grateful than I can ever express.

When my two daughters are my age, I want them to feel the same way. I want them to have the freedom and the opportunity to pursue their passions just as I have.

I want as many Americans as God in His wisdom will allow – white, black, brown or whatever – to live prosperous, healthy, happy lives. I am a huge fan of that wonderful American invention called the middle class.

I want people all over the world to look at America with awe, a reasonable modicum of envy and, depending on who it is that’s looking, either a healthy respect or a chastening fear.

For these reasons, I am supporting Donald Trump. Not because I like or dislike him personally but because I believe that his governing policies – with which the country has recent experience – are the most likely to bequeath to my daughters the freedom, opportunity, prosperity and happiness that I have enjoyed.

Kamala Harris’s idiotic word salads don’t of themselves disqualify her. What disqualifies her are her well-documented policy beliefs – beliefs that she has been of late at some pains to hide – that have proven to be disastrous in places as far away as the Soviet Union and Venezuela and as near as her home state of California.

My support for Donald Trump isn’t personal nor is it blind. I believe that his presidency was by and large a policy tour de force. But I also believe that he has made very significant and costly political mistakes, and that those mistakes are now getting in the way of what might otherwise be an easy path to victory in November.

With that said, I believe in the American people. Get out of their way and the American people will amaze you. Give them the facts – good or bad – and they’ll make the right choices. I believe that Donald Trump shares that conviction.

But based on what I have heard this week, I’m quite convinced that the ruling class Democrats whose speeches I have suffered don’t share that conviction at all. In fact, I believe that they find the very premise preposterous.

The Democratic Party of 2024 is more top-down, command & control-statist in its governing philosophy than at any time in American history – with the possible exception of the Woodrow Wilson era.

So, the choice isn’t really between a more likable Kamala Harris or a less likable Donald Trump. It’s not about either of them.

It’s about a choice between two governing visions that are more divergent than at any time in my adult life.

My experience as an engaged adult, a business owner, a father and a husband – together with my appreciation for the lessons set forth on the blood-soaked pages of history – has led me to my choice.

When I consider it from that perspective, I find that I couldn’t care less about the persons of Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

Questions for Kamala Harris (assuming anyone gets to ask them).

When President Joe Biden finally folded following his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump and dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, the Democrats being the Democrats could scarcely bother with anything as messy as democracy. So they simply crowned Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee without a single vote having been cast by a single voter.

Since her coronation nearly a month ago, she has not sat down for a one-on-one interview, nor has she taken a single question from the press. There are two reasons for this. First is her well-chronicled inability to ad lib a coherent response to a legitimate policy question. When a question exceeds the rather tight limits of Ms. Harris’s intellect, she is given to spewing gibberish punctuated by her trademark nervous cackle.

The second reason is that Biden administration policy is broadly unpopular. Inflation is biting hard in households that not so long ago were able to easily afford groceries, gas and rent. The chaos on the border is impacting schools and hospitals and public services in nearly every community in the nation. The last thing Ms. Harris wants is to be forced to defend the policies of an administration of which she has been a part for the past three and a half years.

So, the Dems are re-running the “2020 Biden-in-the-Basement” playbook and keeping Kamala Harris carefully under wraps.

But Biden had COVID to protect him. Harris doesn’t. She is bound to be forced out of the cloister some time and there are questions that a properly curious media (assuming that such a thing exists) might want to ask her.

Time and space are limited so here are just a few examples.

Madam Vice President, in 2019 you emphatically stated that you would ban fracking for oil and gas. You now say you don’t want to ban fracking. Have you changed your position based on your better understanding of how fracking helps produce affordable energy, or have you changed your position because Pennsylvania – a must-win state for you – is an oil & gas producing state?”

How about this question?

You have said on many occasions that ‘Bidenomics is working.’ You now seem to be distancing yourself from President Biden’s economic policies. Which of the two truly reflects your beliefs?”

Or…

You have repeatedly called for the abolition of private health insurance in favor of a government-run single payer system. That is, in essence, what the VA is. Given that the VA makes veterans wait months or even years for healthcare, how will a scaled-up version of the VA’s health system meet the needs of 330 million Americans?”

Truthful answers to these questions, and questions like them, don’t help Ms. Harris’s election chances. Voters remember not having to put necessities on a credit card. They remember low gas prices.

So, with the help of the corporate media, Ms. Harris is laying low hoping to simply run out the clock on the 2024 election. And she’s hoping that a sufficient number of independent voters won’t notice.

Policy Trumps personality.

There are people who claim to be Republicans but who steadfastly refuse to vote for Donald Trump. That number may have been greater in 2016 and 2020, but it is still a significant number.

Significant enough to perhaps constitute the critical difference in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

I have a good friend who is a perfect example. “What’s your problem with Trump?,” I ask him. “Character matters,” he says. “Donald Trump just isn’t a good guy.”

To which I say neither was Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton. I don’t disagree that character matters. But with respect to the presidency, policy matters more.

The republic has suffered little lasting harm from the philandering of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton. Though Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal did much to destroy the news industry, the Constitution nevertheless emerged intact. We survived Lyndon Johnson’s brutal crudeness. (Stories of Johnson summoning his secretary to take dictation while sitting on the toilet are not disputed.)

On the other hand, Jimmy Carter is one of the most decent men of the 45 who have ever held the office. Yet today’s boiling cauldron of trouble in the Middle East that is bringing us uncomfortably close to World War III is a holdover of Carter’s manifest weakness during the Iran hostage crisis – weakness that paralyzed American foreign policy while embarrassing the nation.

Roosevelt’s infidelity isn’t his legacy. His legacy is his New Deal that let the Big Government genie out of the bottle. The New Deal paved the way for ruinous social welfare policy that has, among its most pernicious effects, destroyed the nuclear black family – all while entrenching rather than reducing poverty.

The fact that Lyndon Johnson had to give up on reelection in 1968 was not because of his crudeness. It was because of his morally bankrupt Vietnam War policy that snuffed out the lives of 58,000 U.S. servicemen toward the accomplishment of no good purpose.

Donald Trump has personal deficiencies. I have expressed my concerns about them many times in this space.

But I would also offer that those deficiencies aren’t nearly as great as a hostile media relentlessly makes them out to be. And I’d further offer that Trump’s presidency was by and large a policy tour-de-force. The economy boomed, the border was secure and foreign adversaries minded their manners. All three have taken a 180 degree turn since Joe Biden took office.

My concerns about Trump’s personality flaws have always been driven solely by my concern as to their impact on his electability.

From a governance standpoint, I’d argue that Trump’s strong personality is more of a feature than a bug. Trump the Mega Alpha going toe-to-toe with Xi Jingping is an altogether more comforting thought than a similarly situated Kamala Harris.

The presidency is a tough job always but a particularly tough job now. The times, they are a cryin’ out for someone tough to hold it.

No one can argue that Trump isn’t tough.

Democrats just can’t let it go.

It is taken as political gospel that it is the Democratic Party – and the Democratic Party alone – that truly cares about the plight of black people in America. I believe it can be fairly said that Democrats have a race fixation. Maybe call it a fetish.

We saw that clearly Wednesday when Donald Trump appeared at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago. ABC’s Rachel Scott began the Q&A with Trump with the clear intent of putting Trump on defense. That led to this question:

RACHEL SCOTT: Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a black woman?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I can say no, I think it’s maybe a little bit different. I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much. She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. And now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”

The media, of course, are beside themselves.

The truth is Trump got rope-a-doped. He should have said it doesn’t matter whether she was a diversity hire or not, race shouldn’t matter at all.

In his defense, Trump didn’t just pull his assertion about Kamala Harris out of thin air. It came from an interview in 2016 when she was running for Senate from California.

KAMALA HARRIS: The Democratic Party for, for a very long time, not just this election cycle, has been doing a lot of active outreach around, to South Asians, around the API in general, and, and will continue to do it. I mean, what we know in particular, when you’re talking about South Asian community, we’re talking about the Indian community more specifically, it is a growing community in the United States, in terms of its voting block, in terms of its participation. And, and I think the party knows that and knows that this is part of our collective community, and there needs to be outreach and inclusion.

INTERVIEWER: And certainly it could become the first, Indian senator in US history, which would be quite an accomplishment.

KAMALA HARRIS: Knock wood. (laughing)”

Nothing better illustrates the Democrats’ race fetish. When it suited Kamala’s convenience to be Indian, she was Indian. Now it suits her to be black so she’s black.

Since 1964, Democrats have done a masterful job of demagoguing race for political gain while Republicans have largely just rolled over. As a result, black voters vote for Democrats at a rate of up to 90 percent.

But what has that demagoguery actually done for black voters? Why, in 2024, with Democrats having overseen government for more of the past 60 years than Republicans, are blacks still dealing with so many of the problems of 1964?

That’s the question black voters should be asking the first (now black) woman to run for president. It’s a question Trump should ask at every rally.

Donald, just let Kamala say it.

If Donald Trump wants to win the 2024 election, I have some advice for him. Let me explain.

Since President Biden’s withdrawal and the almost immediate coronation of Kamala Harris as his replacement, the media has shifted out of Dump Biden Mode and into Kamala Exaltation Mode. Where they once didn’t much care for her, they’re now painting her as a young, vibrant champion of democracy (while grandly indulging themselves in their identity politics fetish).

The media are going to be relentless in their depiction of Kamala Harris as something that she’s not and will never be: an experienced, successful, common sense person who will address the country’s problems with an eye toward improving the lives of ordinary people.

Kamala Harris is exactly none of that. She’s a radical California progressive.

But don’t take my word for it. Take hers.

Let’s start with the southern border.

KAMALA HARRIS: I am in favor of saying that we’re not going to treat people who are undocumented and cross the border as criminals. That’s correct.”

You can just hear would be migrants from all over the world. ‘Oh, wait, I get free stuff and there’s now zero chance I’ll get in trouble? Here I come!’

Remember when Barack Obama said:

BARACK OBAMA: If you like your private health insurance plan you can keep it.”

He never actually meant that, but it sounded good. But Kamala isn’t even saying it.

INTERVIEWER: So, for people out there who like their insurance, they don’t get to keep it?

KAMALA HARRIS: Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care, and you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company. Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”

The 177 million Americans who are covered by private insurance are unlikely to move on happily.

Ms. Harris isn’t a fan of fossil fuels, but she positively detests fracking, even though heating and cooling for those low-income families she’s always going on about would be unaffordable without it.

KAMALA HARRIS: There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. So yeah. And starting with what we can do on day one around public lands. Right?”

As to those who stand to lose their jobs in the fossil fuel industry, Ms. Harris has a plan.

INTERVIEWER: What is the solution for voters who have jobs and interests in the fossil fuel industry?

KAMALA HARRIS: Number one and number two, installation and maintenance of wind turbines and solar paneling.”

Ready jobs and you probably don’t even need a shovel.

Finally, this gem:

INTERVIEWER: People who are convicted in prison, like the Boston Marathon bomber, death row, people who are convicted of sexual assault, they should be able to vote?

KAMALA HARRIS: I think we should have that conversation.”

Here’s my promised advice to Donald Trump. Don’t give Kamala Harris a nickname. Minimize talking about her.

Just round up clips like these – there are about a zillion of them – and let her do her own talking.

The campaign commercials and social media posts will practically make themselves.

And we wonder why the country is drowning in debt.

Here are two numbers for your consideration.

Thirty-four and six.

Thirty-four is the number in trillions of dollars of the U.S. national debt. It’s an incomprehensible number. The word trillion was at one time reserved for discussion regarding distances in the cosmos. Thirty-four trillion miles is about 5.8 light years. That debt is increasing at the rate of about $5.8 billion per day. It means that a baby born today in this country is coming into the world with a $100,000 debt burden hung around its tiny little neck. That burden will only increase day by day.

The second number – six – is the percentage of federal government employees who are working full time in the offices provided for them by whichever federal agency for which they are employed.

You, being the math whiz that you are, can immediately then calculate that 94 out of 100 federal employees either seldom or never use their government offices. This despite an executive order from President Biden ordering federal workers back to the office following the COVID pandemic. Most federal employees just flat out ignored the order.

Among the many implications of the “six” number is the fact that zillions of square feet of office space located in Washington, D.C. – and in very nearly every city of any size in the country – are sitting vacant (particularly on Fridays).

Oh, but they’re “working from home.”

As Joe Biden would say, “C’mon, man!” Sure, some of those employees are putting in a good, solid day. But don’t insult me by telling me it’s most of them. Human nature is human nature. It was close to impossible to get fired from a federal job before everyone went home for the pandemic. If you believe that we’re getting a day’s worth of work for a day’s worth of pay from the 94 out of 100 federal employees who can’t be bothered to come to the office even after they were ordered to do so, I would love an invitation to visit you on your planet. (What color is the sky?)

Speaking of planets, a job on the federal payroll is one of the sweetest deals on this one. There are Lord knows how many studies out there showing that the average federal employee makes 30 to 40 percent more than a private sector employee doing comparable work. And, again, it’s close to impossible to get fired.

The two numbers, “34,” as in trillions of dollars of debt, and “six,” as in percent of federal employees reporting to the office, are not disconnected. In the real world, an organization that is bleeding money looks for ways to cut fixed costs and boost productivity. The fastest way to do that is to reduce head count and get rid of excess overhead.

But this is the government and just-released jobs numbers reveal that federal hiring continues to greatly outpace private sector hiring.

One of the planks in the GOP’s 2024 campaign platform is “Reining in Wasteful Federal Spending.”

Easy.

Start with a federal hiring freeze.

The wrong debate.

In May 2013 I wrote a piece titled, “What this conservative believes.”  In 17 paragraphs of one to two sentences each I stated what I think of as the core beliefs of conservatism.

With that in mind, I am convinced that the highly spun and elaborately staged presidential debates of the recent past – Thursday night included – are way wide of the mark.

Rather than seeking to land gotchas, one liners and zingers, the candidates should be debating the points set forth in my piece of 11 years ago.

Of those 17 points, I’d have picked three for last night.

First is the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives cleave to the Constitution because of the express limitations it places on government. Liberals and progressives chafe against those limitations even as they expend vast amounts of energy seeking to circumvent them.

Which is correct?

Is the Constitution the bedrock document that guarantees the freedom of ordinary citizens that conservatives believe it is, or is it the 18^th century anachronism that is standing in the way of an overdue fundamental transformation of the country that liberals and progressives believe it is?

Let the sides debate.

Second, there’s laissez faire, free-market capitalism. Eleven years ago, I wrote:

I believe that for all the admitted faults of free-market capitalism, it has nevertheless done more to lift humankind out of poverty than any other economic system ever devised.”

Despite a mountain of evidence to support that belief, liberals and progressives vehemently reject the very idea. They believe instead in a centrally planned, highly regulated economic system in which most economic decisions are made for the citizens rather than by the citizens.

Until this question is resolved, we’re going to be at each other’s throats.

Let’s debate it.

Third on my list is the role of government. In my original piece I said:

I believe that government is at once necessary and dangerous. I believe that governments are constituted of humans and that humans can never be trusted not to abuse power over other humans. Thus, I believe in the smallest government possible consistent with defending the peace and enabling the free conduct of commerce.”

I believe this to my core. I further believe that to a large extent, government has been the root source of most of the suffering that mankind has endured throughout history.

But liberals and progressives believe that government is a benign, beneficent force that makes the lives of ordinary citizens better. They believe that because they don’t believe in the sovereignty of the individual. Progressives therefore don’t believe that left to their own devices, that millions of free citizens will make millions of discrete personal decisions that will aggregate to a free, happy and prosperous nation.

Put that on the floor, Jake Tapper, and let the candidates duke it out.

Presidential debates in America have devolved into mere spectacles and are now largely a waste of time.

Are we a nation of free, self-governing people? Or are we a nation of vassals governed by aristocrats?

Let’s have that debate.

He just keeps getting worse.

Every time I think to myself that Joe Biden and his administration cannot get worse – that he has hit rock bottom, the very basement of terribleness – he proves me wrong.

Now he wants to grant, via executive order, what amounts to amnesty to more than 500,000 illegal immigrants. The proposition is that an illegal immigrant who has been in the country for 10 years or more and is married to an American citizen will be granted “parole in place” status.

What this means in plain English is that these people who are in the country illegally need not fear deportation. What’s more, they will move ahead in the line for receipt of a green card, which will grant them permanent legal residence in the United States.

Administration rationale for this move is, of course, cloaked in humanitarian language. “We’ll be keeping families together,” they’re saying. “It’s a recognition of the basic humanity of people who have lived and worked in this country,” they tell us.

Don’t be fooled.

And forget for the moment that this move constitutes a material change to U.S. immigration policy and should thus be debated and voted on by our representatives in Congress, rather than being put in place by the stroke of the executive pen. The simple fact is that Biden and his fellow travelers talk a lot about democracy, but they have very limited patience for it. That is particularly true when the democratic process as exercised by We the People doesn’t favor their far-left policies.

Poll after poll tells us that a decisive majority of Americans oppose Biden’s immigration policies. Most Americans are hardworking and clear thinking. They know that the country cannot withstand the social, fiscal and national security impact attendant to millions and millions of poor, social services consuming, largely unskilled, largely uneducated and – to an unknown but inevitable degree – criminally inclined migrants pouring across our wide-open southern border.

I have asked myself many times why, when the polls clearly reveal that Biden’s immigration policy is wildly unpopular, he pursues it anyway.

My tinfoil hat inner voice whispers to me that Joe Biden has been bought and paid for by Chinese leader Xi Jingping and that XI wants to knock the United States off its perch as the big dog on the world stage. One way to do that is to destabilize the U.S. socially and politically by flooding the country will illegal immigrants. In other words, Xi knows what he wants and Biden is doing as he’s told.

But Occam’s razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the most likely explanation, and the simple explanation is this.

This latest immigration policy move is nothing more and nothing less than a vote grab by an increasingly desperate incumbent president and his increasingly far-left political party.

For the Dems, it’s a short putt from “parole in place” to “eligible to vote.”

Half a million new voters. Let that sink in while you remember that the 2020 election was decided by fewer than 40,000 votes.

Trump the Roadrunner.

The Democrats have thrown everything at Donald Trump. Russia collusion investigations. Impeachment. And most recently, kangaroo court felony convictions.

None of it has worked. Trump is gaining strength. A tsunami of campaign cash is pouring in.

The Dems must feel like Wile E. Coyote. Every surefire ACME-inspired political explosive they have deployed against Donald Trump has detonated in their faces.

You can just see them (between panic attacks) scratching their heads and asking themselves, “Why?”

You and I, on the other hand, are not the least bit puzzled. To someone living in the real world rather than a coastal, liberal bubble, it couldn’t be more obvious.

Food was nearly a third less expensive when Trump was president. No new wars erupted on Trump’s watch. Peace was breaking out in the Middle East. ISIS was neutralized. Xi Jingping, Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Iran were all minding their manners.

Millions of illegal immigrants were not flooding across our southern border. The economy was expanding. Ordinary Americans had money to spend. Real wages were rising. Inflation was low. The middle class was expanding. We were on the verge of energy independence. Boys weren’t playing girls’ sports. We could buy whatever car we wanted.

And here’s a key reason. Unlike every election since 1892 – when Grover Cleveland, like Donald Trump, was running for a third time hoping to secure a second, non-consecutive term – this time around, we don’t have to guess or try to imagine what the administration of the winner will be like.

We’re living with the Biden administration. We remember the Trump administration. The comparison couldn’t be more stark.

All of this to say that it looks like Trump can win on November 5.

Are you ready for what happens next?

If Trump wins, the Left is going to come unglued. It will be far worse than 2016. For the media and the Dems, a Biden loss won’t be because of his dismal record. It won’t be the result of literally having nothing to which Biden can point and say, “This is why I deserve a second term.”

If Biden loses, Democrats won’t gracefully accept the verdict and vow to do better next time. They will revert to form. They’ll try to delegitimize Trump’s victory. They’ll say Biden lost because of some malign force in league with a criminally guilty Donald Trump. Even though it was roundly debunked the first time, count on the Dems to trot out Russia Collusion 2.0.

If Democrats win the House – an acknowledged possibility – a cavalcade of House investigations will immediately follow. (Buckle up for Impeachment 3.0.)

What won’t happen is any introspection. Never will Democrats (or the media – the two function as one), be curious as to why voters would prefer a baggage-laden guy like Donald Trump. They’ll lash out instead.

Plain and simple, if Trump wins, his every day will be a raging maelstrom.

I wish it weren’t so. It will be bad for the country.

But no matter. Because the alternative is just too awful to contemplate.

Reversible error.

When a New York City jury convicted a former president of the United States of multiple felonies – felonies that still cannot be succinctly explained to persons of nominal intelligence – the fact that such a verdict was widely anticipated did little to mitigate the shock of it actually happening.

Legal pundits – mostly on the right but many notably on the left – have opined at length on the long list of reasons that the jury’s verdict against Donald Trump will not survive on appeal. The reasons cited are what lawyers and legal scholars call “reversible errors.” In legal speak, a reversible error is something that the judge in the trial court got wrong that affected the outcome of the case. The list of things that judge Juan Merchan got wrong is too lengthy for this column. I recommend an article at AmericanMind.org by Kenin Spivak.

But the subject of reversible error has me thinking. The country is a mess. There is much gloomy writing on these being the end days of the American experiment.

Possibly. But not inevitably.

Just as Donald Trump’s farcical conviction can be set right by fixing the reversible errors of the trial judge, so too can America be set right by fixing the reversible errors of bad policy.

The mess at our southern border is a reversible error. We know this because the border was under solid operational control during the Trump administration. A return to Trump policy will stop the flood. Most Americans favor deportation of those who have come in illegally. That won’t be easy. But it must be done, and it can be done.

Americans noticed that the vilest of the antisemitic protests on college campuses this spring were on the campuses of our most elite universities. Continuing to hold schools like Columbia and Harvard in high esteem is a reversible error. Prospective students and prospective employers are, in significant numbers, rethinking the value of an elite university degree. That will inevitably chasten those institutions.

Regarding education, many of our country’s primary and secondary schools are teaching kids the wrong things about America. That’s a reversible error, too. School boards are accountable to their local communities. We fix our schools by paying much closer attention to local school board elections.

And then there are our political parties. For decades the paradigm has been that Republicans represented the aristocratic, corporate, Brahmin class, while Democrats represented the middle and the working class. That is in the process of being turned on its head.

For those same decades, Republicans largely wrote off black and Hispanic voters. That is an immediately reversible error. Today’s Republicans are much more aligned with the interests of a black voter aspiring to entry into the middle class than today’s Democrats. Republicans will profit mightily by reaching out to the minorities they once wrote off.

As to Republicans and the election, we’ll never know for certain to what extent cheating and malfeasance made the critical difference in the approximately 40,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that gave Joe Biden the win in 2020. But regardless of whether you believe that malfeasance made the critical difference, failing to be prepared for election night shenanigans was an error – one that must be reversed in those three critical states this time around. And one that can be.

It’s easy, given all that’s going wrong, to become downhearted. Don’t. Much of what’s going wrong can be reversed. And there is ample evidence that the reversal has begun.

An ill wind blowing from lower Manhattan.

For the simple reason that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump marks the first time in American history that a former president has faced a felony prosecution, we have been subjected to a massive volume of commentary.

That volume increased by an order of magnitude earlier this week when the case against Trump was placed in the hands of the jury.

Much – let’s say most – of what is being written and said revolves around the legal intricacies of the case. Read and listen all you want. I promise you will not be able to explain in a simple declarative sentence Bragg’s case against Donald Trump. His theory is so arcane and so tortured that it defies simple explanation.

That isn’t normal in criminal cases.

Criminal cases almost by their nature must be straightforward if they are to be tried before a jury of laypeople. “The defendant murdered his wife,” or, “The defendant embezzled $20 million,” are easily understood.

Bragg’s case isn’t. Among the pundit class, only the lawyers understand Bragg’s theory as to why he believes Donald Trump should be incarcerated as a felon. Even so, when I hear them explain it, I find myself nodding in understanding only to say two minutes later, “Wait, what?”

Against this backdrop, one of the most insightful pieces of commentary comes from FOX News contributor Guy Benson. He believes, as I and many well-credentialed people believe, that if Trump is convicted by a partisan Manhattan jury in the courtroom of an openly and unapologetically partisan judge, the conviction has almost zero chance of surviving on appeal.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is astonishingly flimsy. The Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission looked at the same set of facts that Bragg has and declined to take any action against Trump.

So, if Trump is convicted anyway – as I and many people believe that he will be – the conviction will be temporary. Bragg’s prosecution of Trump is a sieve. It reeks of reversible error. If Trump is convicted, that conviction will shrivel at the appellate level.

But that’s OK by Bragg, and by the Biden campaign, and by radical leftist billionaire George Soros who funded Bragg’s campaign for Manhattan district attorney, and by all those on the left who despise Donald Trump. They only need a Trump conviction to stand until the morning of November 6. That way an enfeebled Biden can use the words, “convicted felon” in every campaign ad.

But, as FOX’s Guy Benson points out, the words “convicted felon” temporarily tattooed on Trump’s forehead could be just enough. The words could move a small – but sufficient – number of votes to give Biden the thinnest edge in one or more of Michigan, Wisconsin or Philadelphia to squeak out a win in the Electoral College.

And thus, we have a third world-worthy example of election interference thanks to a legal system that is losing the respect of ordinary Americans every day.

It all bodes very ill for the health of the republic.

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