????? - Footage of the man who bought the Taylor Swift autographed guitar at an auction to smash it with a hammer.

Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the GOP and Democratic nominees for Vice President of the United States respectively, will debate on Tuesday evening in New York in what might be the last major event with both major U.S. political parties involved before the Nov. 5 election just over a month away. The debate, which will be moderated by CBS News’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, will begin at 9:00 p.m. ET, and most major television networks will carry it live. Since former...

On Tuesday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) faced off in a vice-presidential debate for what could be the last time that Americans hear from either presidential ticket on the debate stage before Election Day. The stakes were high for a vice-presidential debate, so The Washington Post once again asked uncommitted, swing-state voters in real time about their reactions to Tuesday’s debate. They thought Vance performed better, regardless of how they...

Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took the debate stage at a tumultuous time — the Southeastern U.S. ravaged by Hurricane Helene, a war intensifying in the Middle East, dock workers on strike along the East Coast, and Americans grappling with affordability and stability. With 35 days until the presidential election and no further debates scheduled between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, their top surrogates began a final pitch to voters on Tuesday night.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry made the Left’s disdain for the truth clear last week in comments he made at a World Economic Forum panel. During the panel, Kerry said that the First Amendment is a “major block” that prevents the government from being able to silence independent news outlets and conservatives on social media. Kerry said, “Look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick, and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence.” In this episode of The Spectator P.M. Podcast, hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes and Lyrah Margo discuss the importance of the First Amendment and how free speech is a right that cannot be taken away from Americans. They also discuss how Kerry’s comments are part of the Left’s continued efforts to suppress conservative media outlets, such as The American Spectator. Tune in to hear their discussion! Read Ellie and Lyrah’s writing here and here. Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify. Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble. The post <i>The Spectator P.M.</i> Ep. 80: John Kerry Laments That First Amendment Is ‘Major Block’ to Stifling Speech appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A smiling JD Vance shaking hands with a grim-faced Tim Walz at the beginning of last night’s vice presidential debate foreshadowed the feelings of both at the end of the 90-minute discussion. Vance not only outshined Walz, he also showed himself as the only truly great debater among the four candidates on the Republican and Democratic tickets. On Tuesday night, he beat Walz, Margaret Brennan, and Norah O’Donnell in yet another three-liberals-on-one-conservative handicap match. When asked to open the debate about whether they would support an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran, Walz avoided answering the question and the Republican vice presidential nominee said America should stand by its ally. “Kamala Harris is not running as a newcomer to politics,” the Ohioan reminded in one of his more effective moments. “She is the sitting vice president. If she wants to enact all of these policies to make housing more affordable, I invite her to use the office that the American people already gave her, not sit around and campaign and do nothing while Americans find the American Dream of home ownership completely unaffordable.” When asked about lying about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Walz answered: “I grew up in small rural Nebraska” before talking about riding bicycles and supporting legislation benefitting veterans. The nonanswer compelled Brennan to ask the question again. “I misspoke on this,” he answered before again muddying the waters: “I was in Hong Kong and China during the democracy protests.” The Democrat vice presidential nominee strangely cited “women having miscarriages” as a consequence of abortion restrictions. “I’ve become friends with school shooters,” he misspoke during a discussion on gun control. When asked if he supported abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy, the Minnesotan said in non sequitur fashion: “That’s not what the bill says.” Several times a rattled Walz spoke in a staccato style suggesting a reliance on rote talking points. He occasionally paused awkwardly (e.g., “I serve as … co-chair of the Council of Governors”). The pauses never felt so uncomfortable as when he tried to explain his way out of the Tiananmen Square lie. The moderators emphasized gun violence, global warming, health care, a child-care crisis, abortion, and Jan. 6 — generally positive issues for Democrats — and put inflation, for instance, on the back burner. Polls compelled the moderators to ask about immigration, an issue that skews heavily toward Republicans, but they characteristically spun it toward Democrats in crafting the question to emphasize the federal government separating migrant families. Neither O’Donnell nor Brennan asked about crime, a peculiar omission given Walz’s governance of Minnesota when violent riots resulted in massive property destruction and the loss two lives in the Twin Cities area. Walz shined most brightly in his closing, rehearsed statement pointing to a coalition that spanned from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift supporting the optimism and opportunity represented by Kamala Harris’s candidacy. Vance countered, “She’s been the vice president for three and half years. Day one was 1,400 days ago, and her policies have made these problems worse.” The post Vance Outclasses Walz in Debate That Validates His Selection appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The precise wording of the Vatican–China Provisional Agreement, signed on Sept. 22, 2018, remains a closely guarded secret, but its dire effects are plain for all to see. By affording legitimacy to the Chinese Communist Party–dominated Patriotic Catholic Church — theretofore deemed schismatic due its appointments of regime-friendly bishops without papal approval — the Holy See evidently hoped to gain more of a say in the inner workings of its illegitimate Chinese offshoot, while bringing the Chinese Underground Catholic Church out of the shadows. Meant to resolve a 21-century investiture controversy, the Vatican–China pact proved to be nothing short of a catastrophe. Whereas the Road to Canossa ended in the bitterly cold winter of 1077, with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV gaunt from fasting, clad in a penitential hairshirt, and kneeling barefoot in the snow before a triumphant Pope Gregory VII, here Pope Francis found himself, in less dramatic but equally consequential fashion, submitting to China’s paramount leader Xi Jinping, and in a manner that led Hong Kong’s emeritus bishop Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun, to conclude sadly that “the Vatican lost everything, [and] got nothing.” A brief nota informativa, issued by the Vatican press office the day the agreement took effect, gives us some sense of the Vatican’s motivations: With a view to sustaining the proclamation of the Gospel in China, the Holy Father Pope Francis has decided to readmit to full ecclesial communion the remaining ‘official’ Bishops, ordained without Pontifical Mandate and previously subjected to excommunication latae sententiae…Pope Francis hopes that, with these decisions, a new process may begin that will allow the wounds of the past to be overcome, leading to the full communion of all Chinese Catholics. The Catholic Community in China is called to live a more fraternal collaboration, in order to promote with renewed commitment the proclamation of the Gospel. Pursuant to the provisional agreement, the Vatican issued its “Pastoral guidelines of the Holy See concerning the civil registration of clergy in China” on June 28, 2019, further legitimating the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church by allowing bishops and priests to join the ersatz Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, while impotently calling for “respect” for those Chinese Catholics who still refuse to affiliate themselves with the CCP-dominated church, a respect, incidentally, that the genocidal communist regime has never shown underground Christians in the past, and is exceedingly unlikely to in the future. The “wounds of the past” mentioned in the Vatican’s nota informativa are very real, and many members of the Underground Catholic Church in China have proven understandably reluctant to recognize the authority of the counterfeit Patriotic Catholic Church, while Catholic authority figures tend to tread lightly around the issue. In his preface to The Red Book of Chinese Martyrs, the aforementioned Cardinal Joseph Zen found it “necessary to admit that there was also a kind of reluctance, even on the part of the members of the Church, in pointedly denouncing the persecutions sustained under the Mao regime.” But “to continue on this path of silence today,” Zen continued, “would be unpardonable and indefensible,” for “we have a duty to remember, and in particular to remember the martyrs of the twentieth century, all the martyrs, under any regime, and to speak out.” The Vatican has clearly adopted a different approach, engaging in “fraternal collaboration” with a fanatically atheistic, power-hungry regime that holds religion in absolute contempt, and fanatically perpetuates Mao’s legacy by persecuting individuals and communities of all faiths, Christianity included. Churning out propaganda for the regime is one of the primary functions of the Patriotic Catholic Church. That the Vatican–China Provisional Agreement was a veritable deal with the devil should never have been in doubt. We know that a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit, so it has been unsurprising to find leaders of the Patriotic Catholic Church, like Bishop Michael Fu Tieshan, debasing themselves in recent decades on behalf of the CCP by, for example, cheering on the persecution of the Falun Gong religious movement by labeling it as one of the “ugly” “cults” that “pose a threat to society.” Today, prominent members of the Patriotic Catholic Church, like the formerly excommunicated Vincent Zhan Silu, bishop of the archdiocese of Funing, are sinking even lower. Bishop Zhan Silu, for instance, recently participated in a “patriotic education tour,” leading priests and friars on a visit to East Turkestan (Xinjiang), where he exhorted the victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign of religious repression and cultural genocide to “be politically dependable, and study and preach Xi Jinping’s thought diligently.” Zhan Silu, who languished under papal excommunication for some 18 years, must hardly be able to believe his extraordinary luck. He can now hold himself out as the officially recognized bishop of Funing, while simultaneously serving his real masters by acting as an overt communist propaganda agent. Before 2018, there was at least some pretense that someone of his ilk was not fit to serve in such an august role. As its name suggests, churning out propaganda for the regime is one of the primary functions of the Patriotic Catholic Church, all the more so in the aftermath of recent legislative developments embodied in China’s revised Religious Affairs Regulations (2017), the Measures for the Administration of Religious Groups (2020), and the new Patriotic Education Law (2023). “Patriotic education,” which is predicated on “Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Theory of Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” would seem fundamentally incompatible with Catholic doctrine, but the Patriotic Catholic Church has enthusiastically embraced it all the same. It has to. Zhang Chunhua, writing for Bitter Winter, has described visits during the summer of 2024 by Catholic clergy and lay leaders from Guangdong province to various revolutionary education sites, like the Enyangtai Independent Battalion Activity Site, which commemorates the achievements of a particularly brutal Maoist detachment and has become a prominent communist pilgrimage spot. Li Changming, chairman of the Yangjiang City Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, has insisted that Catholic believers must “learn to continue the red bloodline, inherit the red genes, and forge ahead,” prompting the dissident Zhang Chunhua to muse: What Catholicism has to do with the “red genes” and “red bloodlines” of violent Communist agitators (who killed among others quite a few Catholic priests) remains unclear. Or perhaps it is very clear. The Patriotic Catholic Church, which after the Vatican China deal of 2018 operates with the blessing of the Vatican, continues its main business, i.e., transforming Catholic priests and lay leaders into loyal Communists of the “red bloodline.” Reveling in genocide, passing on red genes, forging ahead toward the goals of an inhuman regime, and all with the official imprimatur of the Vatican itself — such is the maddening legacy of the Vatican–China Provisional Agreement. The Patriotic Catholic Church is by no means the only religious body that has been subsumed into the all-encompassing Chinese communist state. The authorized Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim, and Protestant (Three Self Church) religious associations have all similarly submitted to the Zhongnanhai, allowing it to pick their leaders, guide their doctrines, “sinicize” them, and force them to promote “core socialist values and promote the construction of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics.” All this time and energy spent on religious affairs may seem strange coming from a regime run by self-styled “steadfast Marxist atheists” whose only faith is in the disastrous and sadistic tenets of Marxism–Leninism — and the Party does view its Marxism in straightforwardly theological terms, as a genuine “faith” (信仰, or xinyang). How very absurd and unseemly it is, then, for the Chinese government to be organizing forums on the “sinicization” of Taoism, only the most quintessentially Chinese religion there is, or issuing Kafka-esque bureaucratic guidance on the proper procedures for the reincarnation of Tibetan Living Buddhas, with Master Chang Zang of the China Buddhist Association informing his surely baffled co-religionists that “government approval” is an important principle “that must be adhered to in the reincarnation of living Buddhas,” something which  will “play a positive role in managing the affairs of the reincarnation of living Buddhas in accordance with the law, promoting the healthy inheritance of Tibetan Buddhism, and actively guiding Tibetan Buddhism to adapt to socialist society.” There is, however, a definite method to this apparent madness.  Total control of official religious institutions by the Zhongnanhai provides the opportunity for humiliation rituals and propaganda coups, like the Vatican’s 2018 capitulation, and convenient new avenues for political indoctrination, like the “patriotic education” furnished by apparatchiks like Vincent Zhan Silu and Li Changming. The wholesale massacres of Christians in Mao’s day were counterproductive, blackening the country’s reputation abroad and producing too many martyrs. Nowadays, the regime opts for a relatively toned down approach. China’s leaders advocate something known as rùn wù wúshēng (润物无声), or “silent saturation,” a phrase coined by the Tang-era poet Tu Fu in reference to the rejuvenating qualities of spring rain, but now, as Alex Colville of the China Media Project has summarized it, utilized in terms of “the need for more subtle and effective means to disseminate and inculcate the party’s thoughts and agendas.” And we can see in real time that there is no better way to eliminate official religion in China than to co-opt religious institutions and gradually turn them into little more than propaganda organs. A Chinese Christian who belongs to one of these officially tolerated but regime-administered religious institutions, part of what the sociologist Fenggang Yang called the religious Red Market (as opposed to the flourishing underground religious Black Market), will eventually realize that he or she belongs to an organized religion that is, absurdly enough, organized and run by a Party that itself has “zero tolerance” for religious sympathy in its own ranks. A three-fold choice presents itself: remain in an ersatz church that is viewed by its own leaders as having an expiration date, try to secure Party preferment by abandoning one’s faith, or take the dangerous but spiritually fulfilling plunge into the Black Market of underground Christian communities. Wang Yi, a jurist-turned-pastor who founded the Early Rain Covenant house church, argued in his 2010 Our House Church Manifesto [我们的家庭教会立场] that “[O]nce the church falls into the trap of being ruled by emotions, depending on power, or yielding to politics on matters of doctrine, priesthood, or sacraments, they have worshiped a false god. They will have lost the most beautiful quality of Christ’s bride, purity, so that they cease to be the Lord’s church.” It is in the Black Market that many Christians can still find that sense of purity, untainted by the grubby, blood-stained fingers of the Communist regime. The life of the underground Chinese Christian is fraught with peril. Menaced by the government, and all too often ignored by the wider world, members of underground churches and house churches risk imprisonment each and every day. As Pastor Wang Yi so eloquently wrote in an October 2017 pastoral letter, “[T]he world does not recognize you, but your value is, ironically, manifested through their ignorance and lack of recognition. Put another way, you are a group of master ballet dancers performing at a landfill. And this is the meaning of the landfill — that although you will be deemed lunatics by those who stay near it, because of you, the landfill has become an image of the new heaven and the new earth.” All people of faith, all people who value culture and tradition, are in some ways like dancers on the precipice of the vast, churned-up, stinking landfill of modernity, but in China the stakes are so much higher. “However,” concluded Wang Yi, “this is part of the meaning of the landfill, for God has allowed them to be ambitious because he wants to magnify the value of faith. In general, the more terrible the performance environment, the greater the ‘eschatological meaning’ of the church’s show.” Whether one chooses to join the landfill, or dance on its edges, tells you everything. On Dec. 9, 2018, just a few months after the landmark Vatican–China pact, Wang Yi and more than a hundred members of the Early Rain Covenant Church were arrested in Chengdu. A little more than a year later, Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” and conducting “illegal business operations.” Another Chinese Christian prisoner of conscience, Zhu Chunlin, recounted for Weiquanwang (the Chinese Rights Protection Network) the conditions of “strict control and punishment” — psychological abuse and physical torture, often involving heavy iron shackles  — to which he and his co-religionists are regularly subjected: It was the darkest moment in my life. I could only endure it silently and pray to my Lord for mercy! After a while, I could no longer endure it and it was difficult for me to persist. The Spring Festival was approaching, and I followed their advice and wrote a self-criticism. I read it out publicly in the prison area during dinner on February 2, 2019. I was forced to admit that I had been wrong to disobey their punishment measures, and promised to obey them in the future. Later, on the next day, February 3, 2019, they removed the torture instruments from me, ending a painful experience of twenty days. Afterwards, my feet still hurt for a long time. The humiliation, physical, and mental damage caused by the incident will be unforgettable for all my life, an unforgettable memory that will accompany me for the rest of my life. [那是我人生中的一段至暗时刻，我只能默默忍受，向我的主祷告祈求，求神怜悯！后来我实在无法忍耐，难以坚持，新年的春节也已临近，我只好按照他们的意见，写了一份检讨书，于2019年2月2日晚餐时在全监区当众宣读，被迫承认我不服从他们的处罚措施是错误的，保证以后一定要服从，后来才于次日2019年2月3日给我卸除了刑具，结束了我历时20天的痛苦经历，事后我的双脚依然疼痛了好长一段时间。事情给我造成的屈辱和身心伤害让我今生难忘，刻骨铭心的记忆将在我的余生与我常年陪伴。] Such is the treatment Pastor Wang and other members of house churches, who reject the “soundless saturation” of communism, can expect at the hands of the Chinese government. On Feb. 14, 2020, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, met with Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference. It was not, of course, the pastor and political prisoner Wang Yi with whom Archbishop Gallagher met, for he was (and is) still languishing in a Chinese dungeon. No, the Wang Yi with whom the Vatican’s top diplomat met amidst great fanfare was China’s foreign minister of the same name. Benedict Rogers, a human rights activist and founder of Hong Kong Watch, wondered whether:  this bitter irony escape[d] Archbishop Gallagher? Did he raise Pastor Wang’s case — or that of any of those imprisoned and suffering in Chinese prisons or re-education camps for their religious faith? Did he demand the release of Catholics and others who are in jail? Did he address the incarceration of at least one million, perhaps as many as three million, predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in prison camps, which expert Adrian Zenz has described as “the largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust”? The silence from the Vatican on the subject of Pastor Wang Yi and his fellow prisoners is deafening. The complicity of the Patriotic Catholic Church in the crimes of the CCP is an even greater moral outrage. The spectacle of Bishop Vincent Zhan Silu in Xinjiang, urging Uyghurs to “be politically dependable, and study and preach Xi Jinping’s thought diligently,” and of Li Changming in Guangdong, exhorting Chinese Catholics to “continue the red bloodline, inherit the red genes, and forge ahead,” is genuinely sickening.  Abdurehim Otkur, a Uyghur poet, once assumed the voice of the heavenly mountains of Khan Tengri: I rocked the cradle of civilization since time began I have been here, from all-knowing earth’s prime Moment and so my head is as white as my coat,  but a white Flag I will never become, no matter what you do … My head doesn’t bend; I do not sway How, then, did I become a white flag to you? My heart is red fire, and I lift a blue flag with dignity; I march boldly in ancientness, singing My song of victory that echoes the world You, have you forgotten the centuries, The years of my sustenance, collecting My treasures, that you in shameless ingratitude See me as a white flag? For Otkur, the snow-capped mountains of Khan Tengri, those enduring symbols of Uyghur identity, were not be taken for a white flag, even though they had fallen under the sway of the conquering Chinese. So too must the garments of salvation, the robe of his righteousness not be waved like a white flag by those content to wallow in the reeking politico-moral landfill of communist China. Pastor Wang Yi, in his “Declaration of Faithful Disobedience,” proclaimed that “all acts of the church are attempts to prove to the world the real existence of another world,” a world from which the CCP recoils in vampiric fashion, while “the communist regime is filled with fear at a church that is no longer afraid of it.” That same regime, it therefore stands to reason, will gladly collaborate with a church that remains in the grip of fear, oblivious to the lessons of its centuries of sustenance.  READ MORE by Matthew Omolesky: The Stable Path: Two Years of Ukraine’s Fight for Survival Snow Country in Japan The post The Vatican–China Pact Has Proved to Be a Catastrophe appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

True is true, and fair is fair. Give credit where credit is due. Kamala Harris is every bit as smart as my 7-year-old son was at that age. First, about my boy. He now is in his 30s, a delightful guy, the funniest person I ever have known, sharp as a whip, and maybe the cleverest and most insightful mind I ever have encountered. For people who care about such things, he graduated college Phi Beta Kappa. All kinds of good stuff. But this is not about today’s boychik. It is about a quarter-century ago. And about Kamala Harris. Set the stage: He was 7 years old. We cannot judge a kid that age based on the standards we would apply to a college grad or to a mature assembly-line worker with real-world life experience. We are talking 7 years old. There was always something unique about him, a readiness and ability to think creatively outside the box. Sure, lots of his ideas then — on the surface — sounded ridiculous. Laughably so, even when he was dead serious. But it is in the Jewish tradition of Talmudic study to encourage asking serious questions, to encourage independent creative thinking, not merely to capitulate to external norms and “common wisdom.” If we deferred purely to the “common wisdom,” there is no way we could have survived 3,300 years as so small a numerical minority with a shared idea. We would have been absorbed into Judaic oblivion long ago, centuries ago, millennia ago. We see that even now among Jews who indeed are obsessed with melting into the pot. They begin by melting. By the time their kids inherit their indifference and desperation to shed their heritage, they have dissolved. Look at the notorious ones. Bernie Sanders? His only biological son is non-Jewish. George Soros’ Alex is engaged to a Muslim who fasts on Ramadan. Doug Emhoff’s daughter, Ella, insists she is not Jewish and  raises money for Gaza. All gone — like a pottery that has cracked, like grass that has withered, like the flower that has faded, like the shadow that has passed, like the cloud that has vanished, like the wind that has blown, like the dust that has blown in the wind, and like a fleeting dream. But for those Jews who do not break but embrace the faith, the cultural underpinnings of Judaic heritage breed enormous possibilities. The challenge — thus the problem — is that Judaism requires competent parenting for the system to work. If the parents are Judaically ignorant, if they affiliate outside traditional observance and instead leverage Jewish culture for their own secular and leftist purposes, then the result is disastrous. Just look around at the Trotskys from Bernie Sanders on down who have emerged to hate Israel. I wonder whether Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar rub their eyes and even can believe it as the likes of Bernie Sanders come running to support them as they call for the destruction of Israel and the implicit murder of that country’s eight million Jews. You see those “Jewish” haters on the news, arm-in-arm with Arab Muslim foreign students chanting slogans supporting Hamas and Hezbollah: “Jewish Voice for Peace,” “J Street,” “Students for Justice in Palestine.” The only saving grace is that most of those “Jews” are not Jews anyway. Born to non-Jewish maternal lines, whether to outright non-Jewish mothers or maternal grandmothers, or “Marilyn Monroe converted” in “ceremonies” that are nonsense, they ain’t Jews. OK, back to my boy. So he is 7 years old, encouraged both to think grandly and safely outside the box but also to respect both parental authority and schoolteacher authority when “his elders” explain why some thoughts need fine-tuning, why the best creative thinking emerges from the humility of also listening to and respecting other voices of experience and reason. Well, one day he comes to me and says, “Aba (Dad), may I ask you a question about global warming?” I respond “Of course.” First, I explain to him the difference between the anti-American-industry nonsense propagated about “man-made climate change” versus the truly scientific fact that G-d’s earth does indeed go through temperature-shifting cycles, as it has throughout all history. And then I ask “What’s on your mind?” He says he has been thinking about it, since it came up in science class, and he is wondering why no one has tried this solution that occurs to him. (Again, he is 7.): Oh, are all the temperatures too high? Why can’t “they” have an emergency worldwide meeting at the United Nations, gathering the presidents and kings of every country in every continent on the planet, and agree to a worldwide plan that, on a date certain and time certain — let’s say next Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern Time in the United States — every single person, all at once, in every single house and apartment at every single spot in the world, all at the very same time, will all … … TURN ON THEIR AIR CONDITIONERS TO THE MAXIMUM! I stood there, stunned. He was dead serious. I paused, sat down. In the Jewish tradition, I did not laugh at him or make fun of him and his idea. Rather, I talked it through with him. I explained and gave him a very proud hug. (I hugged him often. My first wife, the one I divorced, criticized me anytime I hugged him. My bad. I couldn’t help it.) He has never stopped thinking creatively outside the box. I could give dozens of examples, and, as he matured, those ideas got deeper and deeper. As I noted earlier, by the time he graduated from college, he won cash awards in two different academic departments and was admitted into Phi Beta Kappa. Recently, after hearing and then reading about a Kamala Harris blue-ribbon, gold-standard public policy proposal she purportedly came up with all by herself, I was transported back in time, thinking once again about my son and his proposed solution, 25 years ago, to “end global warming.” And I realized that I had been looking upon Kamala Harris unfairly. It is wrong and unfair to criticize her for failing to think like a grown person in her 50s when in fact she thinks adequately as would be expected from a precocious 7-year-old. When asked what she will do about runaway inflation that four years of her governance has caused — food prices so high that families are skipping a meal daily, energy prices so high that people cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in the winter or cool them in the summer, prices so high at the pump that people cannot afford to drive — she emerged with a remarkable solution: Oh, are all the prices too high? Well, why can’t we have a meeting of all our great leaders in Congress and agree to a nationwide plan that, on a date certain and time certain — let’s say next Wednesday at 12 noon Eastern Time in the United States — every single person, all at once, in every single house and apartment at every single spot in the United States, all at the very same time, will all … … CUT ALL PRICES TO THE MAXIMUM! And that will cure inflation: price controls. Just cut all the prices. Then they won’t be so high. If I were Willie Brown, I would give her a very proud hug. Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. To be invited to attend his three weekly Zoom classes, send a request to rabbi@yioc.org Rav Fischer’s latest 10-minute messages: (i) “There is No Palestine” (here) and (ii) “Jewish Campus Students Need to Stop Whining” (here) READ MORE: Biden Isn’t Sabotaging Harris, Is He? Making the Shining City on the Hill Great Again California’s Billion-Dollar Stem Cell Initiatives End in Failure The post Kamala Harris Is Every Bit as Smart as My 7-Year-Old Son Was appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Left-wing journalist John Ganz has written a new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early Nineties, to answer the question we all want to know: “How did we get to today’s sour politics?” He blames it on the Right, and, for this, he has received wide praise in today’s mainstream media and even receiving some limited respect from the Right. The nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, Becca Rothfeld, somewhat lets the cat out of the Left bag by noting: “Devotees of Ganz’s pugilistic writing on Substack may be surprised by the restraint he displays describing the [Right] crack-up in his first book.” He is: strangely silent on the question of [Donald] Trump. Even when the parallels between past and present are most glaring, Ganz leaves his readers to make them out. Still, even though its claims about present-day America are largely implicit, When the Clock Broke is leagues more insightful on the subject of Trump’s ascent than most writing that purports to address the issue directly.  Rothfeld is not subtle in defining Ganz’s 1990s crack-up precursors: “Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, thinly veiled white supremacist and all-around reactionary Pat Buchanan, and kooky populist maverick Ross Perot, all of whom ran for president in 1992.” At a lower level, the precursors included late-in-life anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, and old Chronicles magazine paleoconservative Samuel Francis. These are the “rejects of what President George H. W. Bush rather menacingly termed the New World Order,” who “felt betrayed by their leaders” in 1992 and provided all of the real political “options in that year’s primaries.” Ganz is correct that Trump is a continuation to some extent of Buchanan, but this was only as one faction among important others, while Duke and company represented minuscule fringes. In 1992 and 1996, Buchanan was a serious candidate representing a nationalist faction, but he only won about a fifth of the primary vote, and in 2000 ran poorly as a third-party candidate. Moreover, Buchanan had supported mainstream Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in 1976.  It so happens that I wrote a book titled Reagan Electionomics: 1976-1984, covering much of the same period, that presented a rather different view. Ganz is not wrong in identifying the Right “crack up” cause with H. W. Bush since conservatives certainly did believe he betrayed them as president, especially on taxes. But as far back as 1972, conservatives opposed President Richard Nixon in a primary for betraying conservative principles. But his opponent was not a “kooky” candidate but Rep. John Ashbrook, who was also chairman of the American Conservative Union. While the American Conservative Union board symbolically supported Buchanan in the 1992 primary, it was not to win the nomination but to show mainstream conservatism’s dissatisfaction with Bush. To fully explain the ’90s Right crack-up, one must start even further back, at least with Ronald Reagan’s speech for Barry Goldwater’s presidency in 1964, and to the 1976 Republican Convention when Reagan ran against President Ford to represent conservative dissatisfaction with Ford’s status quo Republicanism. Reagan called his own conservatism Main Street, as opposed to the Wall Street variety, Neighborhood Conservatism rather than Country Club conservatism. My major job for the ’70s was to produce the plan for campaign manager John Sears to identify policies and issues to attract working-class cultural and religious voters for Reagan’s nomination and election. The plan specifically targeted Main rather than Wall Street. Campaign committees were set up and staffed to emphasize small business, blue collar, ethnic and religious issues, especially to attract Catholic and evangelical Democrats and non-voters. As a later field operations director in 1976, it became clear that recruiting supporters when running against a sitting president would come from neighborhoods rather than country clubs. The first two Republican delegate victories for Reagan in 1976 were won not with national campaign funds but with grassroots operations. Main Street, religious, American Conservative Union, and local conservative entities and volunteers won North Carolina by themselves. Similar means that I am too modest to mention were used to win Missouri, and later, other states. The Main Street cause made it to the 1976 National Convention, but lost to the Country Club. A repeat contest was run in 1980 but, with a purer clubber in H. W. Bush, it was a victory for Main Street. But walkout threats by Bush leaders required choosing him as vice president, setting up the real 1990s “crack up.” In 1988, H. W. Bush won for his Brahmin faction by defeating the Russell Kansas Main St. center–fusionist Bob Dole faction, followed by the traditionalist Pat Robertson, a foreign policy-oriented Jack Kemp, and libertarian Pete du Pont. Contrary to Ganz, the Left, and mainstream media, the main GOP factional contests throughout this whole period were between the Brahmin Right that had dominated the GOP from its inception and the Main Street conservatism of Harding, Coolidge, Taft, Goldwater, and Reagan.  Contrary to Ganz and the Left, the ’90s crack-up on the Right was not hatched by third-raters but with H. W.’s acceptance speech at the 1988 GOP Convention. He promised a “kinder and gentler” presidency, leading Nancy Reagan to murmur “Kinder and gentler than whom?” George W. described his more fundamental fracture as a more “compassionate conservatism” — than whose? Neoconservative columnist for Commentary magazine Matthew Continetti’s impressive history The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, adds that the Reagan factional coalition had been changing in the 1970s, with the moderate Left being “mugged by reality” to move to the Right under Irving Kristol, and others especially on foreign policy. Neocons moved first to influence anticommunists and centrists in both political parties and most did not support Reagan or the GOP until after his election. But several developed close relationships with H. W. Bush. Neocons became major players in his and especially in the W. Bush administrations — intellectuals Continetti later labeled as Reformocons.  Continetti and Ganz both emphasize the importance of the corruption of power in cracking up the Reagan coalition, but a H. W. Bush White House personnel officer explained the underlying difference between the two. When asked by a reporter whether H. W. would continue Reagan’s practice of hiring appointees based on ideological support of his programs, his response was that they would hire loyal experts.  But according to Continetti, the main cause of the crack-up of the Reagan right-led coalition was the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of anticommunism as a unifying Right force. But that simply does not work since the 1988 Convention where H. W. made the break was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the one faction most affected by that loss — the Neoconservatives — were the last to be added to the GOP coalition and were not required to win in 1980. The other major factions were all opposed to communism, but they had wide varieties of positions on what to do about it, as Continetti’s own book makes very clear, causing factionalism as well as unity.  This misunderstanding explicitly leads The Right book from its inception into treating Reagan “as just one character among many” in its Right world. The Reagan coalition’s supposed anticommunist crack-up then led to power for the more centrist Bushes. But that culminated in George W.’s unpopular wars and a domestic economic “calamity.” This opened the way to “Trump, populism and the New Right.” That final crack-up, Continetti concludes, “retailored the fabric of conservatism.” He remains hopeful that this new fabric could become a “part of [true] conservatism” if it could recommit itself “to constitutional democracy and the American ideal of liberty under the law.”  Where does that leave us? Neither the broad Ganz Left view, in which the Right is evil, nor mere hope for a recommitment to old values broadly conceived, is very helpful. What is? In fact, Reagan’s influence did survive communism — even according to Continetti’s Right book. It did so by a change in label. Reagan-inspired groups like the Tea Party and leaders like Rush Limbaugh were deemed “populists” rather than the Reagan fusionists that they in fact said they were. Most Right leaders then and even during Trump’s presidency understood that some part of “populism” did come from Main Street Reagan. Reagan held a sophisticated philosophy of conservatism by synthesizing different factional ideals rather than a simple rationalist political program. His “enduring tension“ methodology still inspires most on the Right, as Gallup surveys confirm. All that is required for the Right to recover from both progressive and Brahmin crack-ups is by rediscovering the real Reagan as the practical way to apply his synthesized ideals to modern times and problems. Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator. 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