Start a daily list of how you are doing okay in an area where you have felt discouraged. These things don’t need to be major wins but tiny ways that you showed up and served well.

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In a campaign that is increasingly turning on who is and isn’t weird, White Dudes for Harris and White Women for Harris are totally having a normal one. These Zoom struggle sessions in support of Vice…

Kamala Harris has benefitted from a cozy relationship with Big Tech. Now, that relationship is being tested with a quid pro quo from major Big Tech donors: If you take our money, you must fire FTC Chair…

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There's a twist in the lunar birth story.

Politics Harris’s Weaknesses Are Complicated The vice president is trying to move the position of minorities backward—which makes campaigning against her difficult. Credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images In a campaign that is increasingly turning on who is and isn’t weird, White Dudes for Harris and White Women for Harris are totally having a normal one. These Zoom struggle sessions in support of Vice President Kamala Harris for president contain all the hallmarks of woke nonsense: weird self-abasement, off-putting lectures to put on “listening ears,” a separation of voters by race that looks eerily like the type of racist thinking it purportedly seeks to excise from the body politic—partly earnest and well-meaning while also not that subtly toxic, a form of outsourcing get-out-the-vote operations to your friendly local human resources department. “Throughout American history, when white men organized, it was often with pointy hats on,” the dude rustler Ross Morales Rocketto was quoted as saying. He apparently also noted, with the good humor for which woke liberals are famous, that the White Dudes for Harris trucker caps were not themselves pointy. Just some dudes and dudettes have good, clean fun, one supposes. But however tendentiously, they are making an important, uh, point: Harris’s path to the presidency, like the defenestrated President Joe Biden before her, runs through white voters living in the suburbs in battleground states. That is why Harris is likely to pick a white dude as her own running mate. The Atlantic dubbed it Harris’s “white boy summer,” calling her would-be veep a “diversity hire.” Some of this is just normal political coalition-building, like John F. Kennedy picking a Texan or Barack Obama tapping Biden. But there’s also the veiled assumption that the country is too racist to elect a black and Asian woman president without a pale-complected pol whose pronouns are he/him by her side. Colin Powell, whose wife died this week, could have been elected president in 1996, if not sooner. In 2008, White Dudes for Obama and White Women for Obama were simply known as the Iowa caucuses.  The Resistance is largely a college-educated white phenomenon. That’s not to say that there aren’t minority voters passionately opposed to the former President Donald Trump, as are the entire civil-rights establishment and all the related activist groups. But Trump has actually grown the Republican Party’s minority vote share, which was true in the last election and is one of the reasons the polls look so different in 2024 than they did in 2020. Trump lost a subset of suburban whites faster than he gained black and Hispanic men, which is one of the reasons he lost in 2020 and why he isn’t guaranteed victory this time around. But it was widely predicted that Trump would do to the GOP and the Hispanic vote what Barry Goldwater, who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, did to the party’s share of the black vote.  Instead, even in defeat in 2020, Trump won the biggest percentage of the Hispanic vote of any Republican presidential nominee since George W. Bush, with diametrically opposed immigration policies. Trump also won nearly one in five black men while carrying white women. Harris is going to try to claw back these minority votes. There is already evidence that the black and Asian voters who do intend to cast ballots for her are more enthusiastic than when Biden was still in the race. But if she wins, it will look more like Biden in 2020 than Obama in 2008. Her cultural approach will be both an asset and a liability.  As the Clinton-era scribe Joe Klein put it, “Democrats, led by their arrogant, elitist academic wing, have pursued a disastrous course for decades, emphasizing identity over unity, equity over equality of opportunity, and playing annoying, euphemistic, dilettante word games, using terms like socialism, gender-affirmation, white privilege, people of color, unhoused, intersectionality (whatever that is), Latinx and pronoun-imprecision—all guaranteed, indeed intended, to kick sand in the face of the bourgeoisie.” That is why the “DEI candidate” talk is complicated. The moniker is certainly accurate in terms of what Harris believes: “Some people start out on first base. Some people start out on third base. And if the goal is truly about equality, it has to be about a goal of saying everybody should end up in the same place. And since we didn’t start in the same place, some folks might need more equitable distribution.” (This was said when she was vice president and might still be fair game and not subject to revision.) To suggest, as some Republicans do, that Harris is uniquely unqualified isn’t quite right, even acknowledging the role race and gender played in her selection by Biden and the reason Democrats didn’t try to replace her too with a Rust Belt governor. It’s also worthwhile to compare Biden’s resume with his results as president and question the whole idea of whether politics is as much of a meritocracy as brain surgery ought to be. Getting the precise anti-Harris messaging right is important if Republicans want to build a multiracial working-class coalition to compete with her coalition of cringe. Even if the dudes don’t abide. The post Harris’s Weaknesses Are Complicated appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Will Harris Be Beholden to Her Big Tech Overlords? Corporations are pouring money into the vice president’s campaign coffers. What will they expect in return? Kamala Harris has benefitted from a cozy relationship with Big Tech. Now, that relationship is being tested with a quid pro quo from major Big Tech donors: If you take our money, you must fire FTC Chair Lina Khan. Harris has raked in the campaign cash from Big Tech. Throughout her political career, these companies have doled out millions in contributions. Alphabet has donated $842,212. Microsoft has shelled out $575,043. Amazon, Apple, and Meta have also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to her campaigns.  Recently, the Democratic megadonor and founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman announced he will give $7 million to a super PAC supporting Harris. But the donation reportedly came with strings attached: Harris must terminate Khan, who has been at the forefront of the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts.  Almost immediately, a chorus of Big Tech donors made the same demand—and media personalities are now predicting she will make good on it. Another Democratic megadonor, Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC and Expedia, demanded the firing of Khan in an interview with CNBC. Diller has said he plans to max out to Harris and has encouraged his fellow billionaires to do the same. CNBC’s Jim Cramer predicted that if Harris were to win, she’d fire both Khan and Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. Hoffman has a particular interest in seeing Khan fired. He sits on the board of Aurora, a self-driving car company that is partially owned by Amazon. Khan is currently taking action against Amazon for monopolistic practices. He also sits on the board of Microsoft. Khan sued Microsoft to block the merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. And it doesn’t end there. Hoffman is also associated with PayPal, a company that faced an antitrust class action lawsuit, and OpenAI, another company investigated by Khan’s FTC. Hoffman thinks that Khan might be hurting his bottom line by enforcing the law, so he wants her gone. All this pressure means something. In countless articles speculating on whether Harris would fire both Kanter and Khan, the Harris campaign has been silent. The most the campaign has provided was a noncommittal answer to CNN: A Harris campaign aide told CNN that there have been “no policy discussions” about replacing Khan at the current time. “She has been the presumptive nominee for three days,” the aide added. All of this raises the question: Is Kamala Harris preparing to go soft on antitrust and instead do the bidding of her Big Tech overlords? The Biden administration has tasked Harris with the role as Artificial Intelligence Czar, overseeing the administration’s policy agenda on AI. What has Harris done in this role? She has championed “fairness” in algorithms, disparities in training data, and countering “harmful” biases. Essentially, Harris has served to just make artificial intelligence more woke; doing nothing to push forward innovation and ensure America’s success in the artificial intelligence race against China. Compare this to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Trump has continued to rail against Big Tech companies for being “too big” and “too powerful.” Both Trump and Vance have supported a crackdown on Big Tech. Vance has voiced his support for Khan’s actions on multiple occasions. During the 2020 election, Google suppressed stories on the Hunter Biden laptop, Twitter restricted pro-Trump PACs from tweeting, and Facebook banned various campaign ads from pro-Trump super PACs. These actions were solely to benefit the Biden-Harris campaign, and were instrumental in getting Biden elected. The former president has pledged that if he were to win, he’d block federal money from going to these tech companies and their anti-disinformation efforts—and fire federal officials who aided and abetted censorship. Trump’s plans include both executive orders and legislation, which he has proposed under his “Free Speech Platform.”  If Harris were to win, what would she do with regard to Big Tech? Say what you will about Joe Biden, but it’s hard to argue his administration has been very friendly to the tech companies. Would Kamala Harris continue that legacy? Or would she push the Democrat Party in a direction more favorable to her Big Tech paymasters? If the past is any predictor of the future, Kamala Harris is likely to become our most pro-Big Tech president ever if she wins. It appears very likely that she would indeed fire Lina Khan at the request of those who have funded her career. And that would be terrible news for the American people who are sick of a few powerful Big Tech companies controlling the free flow of information and thus our elections. The post Will Harris Be Beholden to Her Big Tech Overlords? appeared first on The American Conservative.