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| Good evening, it's Friday, August 2nd. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| Tonight... | |
| Even though Kamala Harris has not campaigned and not received a single vote, she has now amassed enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination as the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. | |
| Yay! | |
| Congratulations to her and for the long, exciting list of first-evers that have now been attained, which I'm sure we will hear an endless amount about. | |
| Yet, it continues to be genuinely remarkable, I can't really get over it, how completely bereft Kamala Harris is of any actual beliefs and how virtually nobody in the media has seemed to notice, let alone objected, that she has secured the presidential nomination of a major political party three months before an election without having to so much as answer a single question about what she does and does not believe. | |
| To the extent we know anything about her current views beyond the standard culture war quibbling that the two parties do, it's that many of the regressive views and policies she claimed to believe in and support when running for the Democratic Party nomination in 2020 are views that she conveniently no longer holds. | |
| But even there, we have not heard that directly from Kamala, but only in written press releases issued on behalf of her and in her name by her campaign. | |
| I really cannot think of a single instance in recent political history even comparable to this bizarre situation where we have a major party candidate who three months before the election is deliberately remaining a completely blank slate on every major policy question, even though she's the sitting vice president serving under a person that the entire Democratic Party has spent the last eight weeks accusing of being mentally incapacitated. | |
| It seems like we ought to know what she thinks about basic issues. | |
| Then, tonight we will welcome the supremely independent journalist and friend of the show, Li Fong. | |
| He has lived in California, specifically in the Bay Area, for a long time and has studiously followed Kamala Harris's political career for many years. | |
| He recently wrote an article on his Substack. | |
| In title, quote, who is behind Kamala Harris that attempts to see if there is any actual substance or fixed beliefs to her and who it is who has financed her campaign and what their beliefs actually are. | |
| It's absurd that we have to speculate and try and read the tea leaves to understand what her ideological view and mindset about the world is, but that is the reality of where we are. | |
| Finally, there is a faction of the Democratic Party that calls itself the left. | |
| Now these are not the real committed leftists who refuse to vote for the Democratic candidate and instead vote for Jill Stein or Cornel West or back in the day Ralph Nader, you know, actual leftists. | |
| These people, the ones I'm talking about, are the faction that are followers of Bernie Sanders of AOC and, like that pointless duo, vows eternal and unconditional support to the Democratic Party, announces that in advance that they will always vote Democrat no matter what, And then they remain in a constant state of confusion and bewilderment and sadness about why Democrats don't care in the slightest about anything they want or say. | |
| And yet they continue to kneel before the party and plead for a few crumbs, which are never forthcoming. | |
| It's really hard to imagine a group of people more pathetically self-degrading, bereft of dignity and drowning in infinite impotence than they. | |
| But they do exert some small amount of influence within the Democratic Party. | |
| And for that reason, along with the entertainment value I confessed that I find in them, it makes it worthwhile spending a few minutes talking about their sad and pointless political existence. | |
| And so we will devote a few minutes to doing that tonight. | |
| Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes. | |
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| Finally, every Tuesday and Thursday night, once we're done with our live show here on Rumble, we move to Locals, which is part of the Rumble community where we have our live interactive after show. | |
| That After Show is available only for members of our localist community, and I just want to make a comment about last night's show, which we actually put on the live show to give you a sense of the kinds of things, the kind of vibe and ethos that After Show has, for those of you who didn't see it. | |
| I devoted that show to giving a send-off to Michael Tracy, who did a great job in filling in for me while I was gone for 10 days or so. | |
| I thought that was going to be the goodbye for him. | |
| He's still looking around, but he's strictly prohibited from appearing in front of a camera. | |
| But he and I sat and talked as that After Show, and it got a lot of positive feedback. | |
| But some of you complained, and I heard this from a fair number of sources, that it was difficult to listen to because he and I often interrupted each other and were yelling at each other. | |
| And I just have to say, I think it's a valid critique for those of you who shared it. | |
| I think the reason is that Michael and I talked about it today is because we speak offline, and that's how we often speak, kind of interrupting and yelling over each other. | |
| And I totally understand those of you who say that it was headache-inducing to listening to. | |
| That's often how I feel when I get off the phone with Michael. | |
| I have a throbbing headache as well. | |
| But for those of you who liked it, I'm glad you did. | |
| But typically on the after show, what we do is we interact with our audience. | |
| We take your questions and respond to your feedback and critiques. | |
| We elevate the critiques in particular to try and address. | |
| And we take suggestions for future show and future guests. | |
| For those of you who want to have access to that after show as well as multiple other interactive features that we have on that platform, simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that site. | |
| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
| In just about three months, the country will choose between, in reality, two presidential candidates even though there are others like RFK Jr. | |
| as an independent and Jill Stein, but two who have any viable chance to become president. | |
| One of those is Donald Trump, who served as president for four years from 2017 until 2021. | |
| And who has been very vocal about what he believes and what he thinks about a wide range of political views, both when he ran for office in 2016, during the four years when he was president, and now during this campaign. | |
| And he will be running against somebody, Kamala Harris, representing the Democratic Party, who I defy anyone to explain what she believes at all about any issues other than culture war issues. | |
| She pretended to believe in a whole set of policies when she was trying to convince the Democratic Party voters to make her the nominee in 2019, when she was actually campaigning for that position. | |
| And she ran for about two months until her candidacy collapsed in a heap of ashes and failure. | |
| And as vice president, when she was chosen by Joe Biden, she was essentially invisible and hidden and almost spoke about nothing. | |
| And now suddenly she's the Democratic nominee, even though she hasn't campaigned or received a single vote for that position. | |
| She has now secured enough pledge delegates to ensure that she will actually be the Democratic nominee once the Democratic convention convenes. | |
| And we just don't know anything about what she believes, what she supports, what role she's currently playing in the government, who is making any of the decisions in our government. | |
| Or what she would intend to do when she becomes president. | |
| We're sort of left to speculate and try and read tea leaves and just sort of guess about what this person would support and what she might do when she becomes president. | |
| It's obviously a deliberate campaign to make her completely bereft of any actual substantive beliefs in order not to alienate people who disagree with what she's doing. | |
| The only reason she can get away with that Is if the media permits her to, and of course the media thus far and probably will continue to, is permitting that because they want to celebrate her and ensure that they do everything possible to prevent Donald Trump from winning. | |
| Here from the New York Times today announcing the big news, quote, Kamala Harris now has the votes needed to be the nominee, the Democratic National Committee says. | |
| Quote, the party chair said she had won enough delegates to secure the nomination, setting up Kamala Harris to become the first black woman and person of South Asian heritage to earn the top spot on a major political ticket for president. | |
| Now you're going to hear a lot about all these demographic first-evers. | |
| And they're true and they're, I guess, worth noting and passing, but I think a lot more important would be understanding what she thinks and believes and what she would actually do if she becomes president. | |
| And the election is only three months away and thus far we have heard nothing about that. | |
| The aforementioned Michael Tracy on Twitter noted earlier today that if you go to Kamala Harris' website, you won't find a single policy position there either. | |
| It's just kind of a personal bio and fundraising solicitations, he said, and a bunch of merchandise. | |
| He said she really is a, quote, historic candidate. | |
| Historic in the shocking lack of scrutiny she's been subjected to. | |
| And then if you go to her website, you'll see that Michael is describing that very correctly. | |
| She does have a website, Kamala Harris for President. | |
| Together we can win this. | |
| There she is smiling with that pretty blue collar that represents the Democratic Party. | |
| You can donate to her. | |
| You can buy merchandise for her. | |
| From her, you can join her emailing list. | |
| But unfortunately, what you cannot do on this site or anywhere else is find out what she actually thinks about any of the issues that she would confront as president. | |
| Unfortunately, that is missing from this site. | |
| Maybe they're still constructing it and one day it will be added. | |
| But as of now, there's no journalist demanding that she sit down with them to ask these questions. | |
| There's no journalist, at least in corporate media, complaining about it. | |
| Her campaign doesn't offer any of those questions or answers, doesn't answer anything, and her website, even her website, doesn't have standard cliches about the sort of positions that she might take. | |
| Now, if you listen to how the media talks about Kamala's candidacy, presidential candidacy, You often hear not about her political views, which she seems at least at the moment not to have, but instead, quote, what she represents and why that's so special. | |
| Here from CNN earlier today when they announced with great excitement that the DNC chairman has announced that Kamala now has the vote needed to secure the Democratic nomination, here's what CNN understands about Kamala's presidency. here's what CNN understands about Kamala's presidency. | |
| Vice President Kamala Harris has now earned enough delegate votes to become the Democratic nominee for president. | |
| So it is officially official ahead of the convention. | |
| It is, says CNN, officially official. | |
| They're so excited they can't even really speak in coherent sentences. | |
| But they do go on to find enough tranquility, enough focus to actually talk about Kamala Harris's candidacy in ways that I think are quite revealing. | |
| But just so you know, it is officially official that Kamala Harris will be the nominee for president for the Democratic Party. | |
| Of course, all of the fanfare, but this is it. | |
| This is the real count. | |
| Yeah, the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison, announcing that on a call that is going on right now. | |
| We should remind viewers that delegates are actually voting online and that's how they were able to go through this process before the convention. | |
| Let's go straight to CNN's David Chalian. | |
| David. | |
| This is history in the making. | |
| I mean, she is breaking a number of barriers. | |
| Just listen to how, look at how they're all smiling. | |
| So uncontrolled. | |
| They're beaming with so much happiness and so much pride. | |
| I mean, I'm not exaggerating. | |
| Here you see... | |
| Here's the two anchors. | |
| I can try and find in the recesses of my brain what their names are, but it doesn't really matter. | |
| They're CNN hosts. | |
| And here she is smiling on the right. | |
| And when you go to the correspondent who's going to tell us what this means, why it's so important, he's really beaming with joy. | |
| He has a gigantic smile on his face as if like his first child had just been born. | |
| He can't contain it. | |
| It's just emanating from his being. | |
| In the making. | |
| I mean, she is breaking a number of barriers, but also part of an unprecedented race for the White House. | |
| No doubt about it. | |
| So it is the second female Democratic nominee ever in history. | |
| It is the first ever woman of color, black woman, South Asian descent woman on the ticket here. | |
| Lots of firsts for Kamala Harris. | |
| She's very familiar with being first. | |
| She's been the first in almost every political job that she's had, and so being first is nothing new to her, but it is part of what we are seeing with the Democratic Party. | |
| Part of what this 12-day whiplash speed of coalescing around her is this excitement inside the party about what she represents, what she brings to the table. | |
| I know, but like, what does she believe? | |
| I mean, if we're going to talk about what she represents, isn't it kind of important to know what her positions are, what her perspective is, the kind of policy she intends to pursue, what her views are on all the current wars that the United States is involved with and the war that the Middle East is on the brink of exploding into that the United States government through some unknown decision maker has vowed to involve themselves in on the side of Israel? | |
| Is it important to know what she thinks about all that? | |
| Or immigration? | |
| Or jobs? | |
| Or trade? | |
| Like, what is her view? | |
| Is she capable of speaking about these things? | |
| And if so, what does she think? | |
| Yes, we're so happy that she's the first of all these things. | |
| The second ever woman on a major presidential ticket. | |
| And the first ever woman of color, the second African-American or black person to be the major nominee. | |
| Congratulations. | |
| It's all so exciting. | |
| And I joined CNN and being that excited. | |
| But you just see what they don't even it doesn't even occur to them to wonder. | |
| Hey, isn't it weird that she's not actually doing what every presidential candidate does, which is saying what she believes in order to convince people to vote for her? | |
| Now, Donald Trump appeared at the National Association of Black Journalists a couple of days ago, and we covered some of that, and he made comments about Kamala Harris, and specifically the way in which she identifies racially, that caused a lot of controversy, in particular because Trump often takes a kernel of a valid point and just does not articulate it well. | |
| It's just not one of his talents. | |
| You can see what point he's trying to make if he pay close political attention, but it just doesn't come out the right way, and that is often what allows the media to distort what he's saying and to make it up because it's not very clear, But here is what Trump said about Kamala Harris and obviously the point that he was trying to make about the way in which she exploits her racial identity in order to advance her political needs of the moment. | |
| Then we'll move on to other questions here. | |
| Some of your own supporters, including Republicans on Capitol Hill, have labeled Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the first black and Asian American woman to serve as vice president, be on a major party ticket as a DEI hire. | |
| Is that acceptable language to you? | |
| And will you tell those Republicans and those supporters to stop it? | |
| How do you, how do you define DEI? | |
| Go ahead. | |
| How do you define it? | |
| Diversity, equity, inclusion? | |
| Okay, yeah. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Is that what your definition? | |
| That is, that is literally the words. | |
| Give me a definition then. | |
| Would you give me a definition? | |
| DEI. | |
| Give me a definition. | |
| Sir, I'm asking you a question, a very direct question. | |
| No, no, you have to define it. | |
| Define the, define it for me if you will. | |
| I just defined it, sir. | |
| Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a black woman? | |
| Well, I can say no. | |
| I think it's maybe a little bit different, so. | |
| I've known her a long time indirectly not directly very much and 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? | |
| She is always identified as a black woman. | |
| I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't. | |
| Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a black woman. | |
| Just to be clear, sir, do you believe... I think somebody should look into that, too, when you ask a continue in a very hostile, nasty town. | |
| It's a direct question, sir. | |
| Do you believe that Vice President... Alright, so... | |
| That was how that interview mostly went. | |
| This journalist from ABC News was clearly speaking as sort of a representative of the Kamala Harris campaign. | |
| Those were not actual questions. | |
| Saying, will you tell Republicans to stop saying these things? | |
| And the first question was even worse. | |
| It was like a series of 10 or 11 accusations strung together. | |
| All of which were designed to accuse Trump of being a racist and sort of said, what about all this? | |
| And it was an argument much more than a question. | |
| But you see the point that Trump was making, but you also see the way in which he said it allowed people to argue that what he was trying to say was that she wasn't really black until a few years ago. | |
| Now, obviously, If you are of a certain race, because your parents are of a certain race, you don't turn black. | |
| You're always black. | |
| You're always of South Asian or Indian descent. | |
| You also can be two things at once. | |
| That's very common these days for people to be of mixed race. | |
| But what he was trying to say, but didn't say very well, is that she's the kind of politician who just becomes whatever she needs to be in the moment. | |
| Somebody who made that point Much, much, much, much better than Trump made it in that moment was his vice presidential running mate, the senator from Ohio, J.D. | |
| Vance. | |
| Here he was being confronted by CNN in a very personal way about Trump's remarks, and you'll hear what his argument was in a much clearer and more concise way. | |
| A former president's comments yesterday to the National Association of Black Journalists where he said that Vice President Harris is, quote, all of a sudden black. | |
| As a father of three biracial children, did those comments give you pause at all? | |
| They don't give me pause at all. | |
| Look, all he said is that Kamala Harris is a chameleon. | |
| She goes to Georgia two days ago. | |
| She was raised in Canada. | |
| She puts on a fake southern accent. | |
| She is everything to everybody and she pretends to be somebody different depending on which audience she's in front of. | |
| I think it's totally reasonable for the president to call that out. | |
| And that's all he did. | |
| I mean, look, she's running as a tough-on-crime prosecutor even though she implemented open border policy. | |
| She's saying that she wants to support the police, yet she wanted to defund the police just three years ago. | |
| It's totally reasonable to call out the fact that she pretends to be somebody different depending on the audience she's talking to. | |
| Now that's the argument that's obviously valid, and obviously Trump made it in a, at best, inelegant manner. | |
| But that argument that Trump was clearly trying to express, and that J.D. | |
| Vance very clearly expressed, is undeniably true. | |
| And it's evidenced by the fact that she now repudiates Some of the defining policy positions of her 2020 campaign that was only four years ago and somehow she no longer believes them anymore because now she's not seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party but appealing to a general electorate. | |
| Even the New York Times is acknowledging that although somehow suggesting that it's actually something she should be praised for and celebrated for. | |
| Here's how they frame it today. | |
| What Kamala Harris learned from a bruising 2020 primary And it's so interesting they go through all the different ways that she's become a completely different person than the one that ran four years ago. | |
| And you can see they're kind of suggesting that it's politically wise of her to do that. | |
| But they do, in the course of praising her for completely transforming like a chameleon, list all the different ways that she's just abandoned all the things she said she believed in just four years ago. | |
| Quote, the Vice President has a rare opportunity to reintroduce herself to the American public. | |
| Why are there multiple different versions of Kamala Harris? | |
| with lessons from the first time. | |
| Harris is shaping up to be a different type of candidate this time. | |
| This version of Kamala Harris is one who sounds more like the one at that introductory speech in Oakland than the inconsistent candidate she proved to be. | |
| Why are there multiple different versions of Kamala Harris? | |
| Not from 30 years ago as compared to today, but from four years ago as compared to today. | |
| Here are four key ways the Kamala Harris of 2024 is different from and informed by the Kamala Harris of 2019. | |
| And that's the point Trump was making, trying to make, and that J.D. | |
| Vance made, is that you don't know who Kamala Harris is. | |
| She's everything and nothing. | |
| She's everything she needs to be, depending on whoever she's talking to, whoever she's trying to aggrandize, and that's somebody without any actual fixed or principled positions. | |
| The New York Times goes on, quote, she got comfortable with her prosecutor past. | |
| Back in 2019, in an open Democratic primary field where progressive candidates and activist groups exerted substantial power, Ms. | |
| Harris shied away from her record as a prosecutor and the Attorney General of California. | |
| For months, Ms. | |
| Harris failed to aggressively push back on criticism of her record and the social media slogan, quote, Kamala is a cop. | |
| And she did not release a policy position on the issue until long after her top Democratic rivals did. | |
| Already, the Harris 2024 campaign has demonstrated that it does not intend to make the same mistake. | |
| Last week, in Ms. Harris' first address to her campaign staff in Wilmington, Delaware, her history as a prosecutor was front and center, a core part of the contrast she is drawing with former President Donald J. Trump, who is now a fill-in. | |
| Quote, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. | |
| She said predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. | |
| So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type. | |
| She's willing to reject the left. | |
| This is another important... Now let me just stop there before I get to how she's willing to just It's not just Kamala Harris who completely transformed. | |
| she no longer needs them since she's not running for the Democratic primary nomination. | |
| She knows the left will fall into line behind her no matter what she does. | |
| It's not just Kamala Harris who completely transformed. | |
| Do you remember in 2020? | |
| I do. | |
| When, not just the left wing of the Democratic Party, but pretty much the entire Democratic Party was marching in months-long destructive protests and they were waving the banner of defund the police. | |
| And there was a hashtag #ACAB, all cops are bastards. | |
| And it's true that in 2020, when left-wing supporters of Bernie Sanders were trying to discredit Kamala Harris, they did so by calling her a cop. | |
| And the entire, certainly left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2020 had the view that cops are bad. | |
| They should be defunded. | |
| We don't like cops. | |
| They're racist. | |
| They're corrupt. | |
| They're abusive. | |
| Just as an entity, An AOC in 2020 said, yes, I say defund the police and defund the police means defund the police. | |
| It wasn't some metaphor. | |
| It wasn't some political hyperbole. | |
| That was the view of a significant chunk of the Democratic Party. | |
| Kamala Harris is still in her past a quote unquote cop. | |
| That's what a district attorney is, someone who tries to put people in prison. | |
| for alleged crimes. | |
| She's part of law enforcement, and what destroyed or harmed or crippled her candidacy in 2020 was when Tulsi Gabbard pointed out that while she's trying to appeal to the marginalized populations, the minority populations, Kamala Harris's past, the way she built her career, was on the backs of putting into prison a huge number of non-violent drug offenders, disproportionately black drug offenders. | |
| And that was something the left just four years ago claimed they hated to the point where they were marching in the street and burning down cities in order to protest against. | |
| And now they're all congregating behind Kamala Harris, who they not only called a cop in 2020, but who's now making her past as a prosecutor front and center to her campaign. | |
| Here's something else that she learned. | |
| Quote, she is willing to reject the left. | |
| Another effect of Ms. | |
| Harris' time as Mr. Biden's vice president is that she has created more distance between her and the party's progressive wing. | |
| Outside of the issue of abortion access, on which the vice president has forged a close relationship with the activists left, the Kamala Harris of the 2020 primary, who took great pains not to upset slices of the party most associated with Mr. Sanders and Ms. | |
| Warren, is no more. | |
| That Kamala Harris is no more. | |
| She just like, poof, that Kamala Harris disappeared. | |
| You can't find her anymore. | |
| It doesn't exist, that Kamala Harris. | |
| Do you see how they're talking about how many different Kamala Harris's there are? | |
| Quote, Ms. | |
| Harris has reversed several policy positions from her time in the 2020 presidential race, making clear that she no longer supports a single-payer, Medicare-for-all-style health insurance system, something she said she advocated for and would implement if she became president in 2020. | |
| She also no longer supports a fracking ban, a ban on fracking, something she said she favors when running for president in 2020. | |
| And she no longer supports mandatory gun buybacks. | |
| Another policy she supported four years ago, all of which were popular within the Democratic Party, but which are policies that could alienate the general electorate that she now needs. | |
| I guess politicians do this, it seems very inconceivable to me that you wake up one day and you go into public and you pronounce your vehement support, your convicted, passionate support for a whole set of policy issues, and then just a couple years later, that version of yourself is just jettisoned and you completely switch positions, not in a nuanced way, just a 180 degree reversal, because you're willing to say and do anything in order to be elected. | |
| The article goes on, quote, Ms. | |
| Harris's newfound willingness to keep the progressive wing at arm's length will be critical as Republicans gear up to use her previous policy statements against her. | |
| In one interview in June 2020 amid global protests for racial justice, Ms. | |
| Harris said she believed that the country should, quote, redirect resources. | |
| From police departments. | |
| Conservatives have used this to characterize Ms. | |
| Harris as anti-police, even though she never embraced the broader, quote, defund the police movement. | |
| Right, she said, let's redirect resources away from the police at the time that everybody was in the street chanting, defund the police. | |
| Quote, I don't believe we should defund the police, she told me in an interview in August 2023. | |
| Criminal justice policy, she said, should be motivated by what actually works and what is worth spending money on. | |
| Quote, if we are thinking that way, she added, then let's figure out what we are doing around things like prevention because it's actually cheaper than reaction after it occurs. | |
| So you can go through. | |
| We have Lee here, so we're going to get to him in just a second. | |
| But here is a town hall clip of her in 2019 announcing that she supports a single-payer Medicare-for-all system that is popular among the left wing of the Democratic Party and yet anathema to, at least in the perception of the Democratic Party, polls don't really show this, but they believe that it's anathema to centrists or center-right voters in the swing states that they're trying to attract. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| What is your solution to ensure that people have access to quality health care at an affordable price? | |
| And does that solution involve cutting insurance companies as we know them out of the equation? | |
| I believe the solution, and I actually feel very strongly about this, is that we need to have Medicare for All. | |
| That's just the bottom line. | |
| We need Medicare for All. | |
| That's the bottom line. | |
| We need the government providing Medicare for All The Democrats in the audience cheered as she expected that they would. | |
| And you see, she wasn't equivocating on it. | |
| She was making a point that that's just the reality. | |
| We need Medicare for all. | |
| Period. | |
| And then she went on to say this. | |
| Look at that applause she got. | |
| And she's sitting there with that applause saying, thank you, I know, I know, I'm so wonderful. | |
| I know, I'm saying all the things you want to hear. | |
| I believe in Medicare for All. | |
| And then she goes on to say this. - This, and this is, I think, why you're also asking this question. | |
| What we know is that to live in a civil society, to be true to the ideals and the spirit of who we say we are as a country, we have to appreciate and understand that access to healthcare, it should not be thought of as a privilege. | |
| It should be understood to be a right. | |
| It should be understood to be something that all people should be entitled to, so that they can live a productive life, so they can have dignity. | |
| And having a system that makes a difference in terms of who receives what based on your income, Alright, so then she goes on to argue for why Medicare for All is not just so important and single-payer healthcare system is so important but is actually a fundamental right. | |
| A fundamental right! | |
| That's not the kind of thing that you change your view on within a couple years because it becomes politically expedient to do so. | |
| Here she is At CNN's Climate Town Hall in September 2019, that same time hall where she talked about how urgent it is that we ban fracking in the United States to save the planet. | |
| There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking. | |
| And starting with what we can do on day one around public lands, right? | |
| Okay, so there's no question. | |
| Same thing with Medicare for All. | |
| She said, I'm in favor of Medicare for All, period. | |
| She said, there's no question I support a ban on fracking. | |
| In fact, we need to think about how we can ban fracking. | |
| Everything we can do on day one, that's how important it was to ban fracking in the name of saving the planet and protecting the country or the planet from climate change. | |
| Here is an article on CNN from July 30th, so just a few days ago. | |
| Kamala Harris recalibrates her policy stances as she adjusts to her role atop the Democratic ticket. | |
| I love that word, recalibrates. | |
| That means completely abandons her old positions from just a few years ago and adopts completely new ones. | |
| Quote, a Harris campaign official said Monday she no longer supports a fracking ban. | |
| Harris's campaign also confirmed this week that the vice president no longer supports a single-payer health care system. | |
| On police funding, in the midst of nationwide 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd's murder of a Minneapolis police officer, Harris voiced support for the Defund the Police movement, which argues for redirecting funds from law enforcement to social services. | |
| Democrats largely backed away from calls to defend the police after Republicans attempted to tie the movement to increases in crime during the 2022 midterms. | |
| Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair for the Harris campaign and a former mayor of New Orleans walked back a quote defund the police sentiment voiced by Harris in 2020 saying what she meant is she supports being quote tough and smart on crime. | |
| So as I said if you look at Donald Trump You can see over the course of eight years, I'm not saying it's totally consistent, but you understand what he would do in office. | |
| He was just in office as recently as 2021. | |
| Same with Joe Biden. | |
| He's been around for 50 years. | |
| Kamala Harris has barely been in Washington. | |
| She's been there like in a blink of an eye. | |
| She was a senator for a few years and chosen as Joe Biden's vice president, basically hidden from public view, barely speaking at all. | |
| We're three months away from the presidency and all we know about her beliefs Is that her campaign has issued statements in her name essentially just almost laughingly saying, oh yeah, all that stuff she pretended to believe in four years ago, she actually no longer believes in any of that now. | |
| That's what makes it so dangerous, extra dangerous, particularly dangerous, that she has a very good chance to be elected president in three months. | |
| Even though we know almost nothing about what she believes, other than the fact that what she believes changes dramatically from year to year based on the immediate need of the moment. | |
| Not the immediate need for the country, but for her political career. | |
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| Li Fong is an intrepid independent reporter and journalist. | |
| He was formerly my colleague at The Intercept. | |
| He now has his own reporting and journalism platform over at Substack. | |
| He's been on our show many times to talk about the investigations that he does, the true kind of investigative reporting, especially tracing finances and how it affects our politics that we need. | |
| And he has another article that does exactly that. | |
| That relates to the topic we were just covering, which is Kamala Harris. | |
| The article is entitled, Who is Behind Kamala Harris? | |
| As the saying goes, personnel is policy, and he essentially traces the people who have been closest to Kamala Harris and most influential in helping her career to try and decipher, since she won't say herself, what her views actually are. | |
| Lee, good evening. | |
| It's always great to see you. | |
| Hope you're doing well. | |
| Thanks for joining us. | |
| Hey, thanks for having me. | |
| Welcome back. | |
| Yeah, well, welcome back to you, I think is what we mean. | |
| All right, I've been here the whole time. | |
| Although, actually, I've been away for 10 days and just got back from vacation, so maybe that's what you mean. | |
| Anyway, let's try and get to the substance of what you're here for. | |
| So we were just talking about the fact that Kamala Harris is a candidate who right now is somebody who seems deliberately eager and unwilling to avoid taking any actual substantive positions, leaving people to kind of try and have to guess through clues and tea leaves. | |
| What sort of candidate she's been? | |
| You've been someone who has been aware of and paying attention to Kamala Harris' career before she got to Washington as an elected senator from California when she was district attorney in San Francisco and then California attorney general. | |
| And one of the things you do in this article is try and trace who are her most important financiers and donors and advisors and aides, sort of like the close circle. | |
| Who has been around Kamala Harris in order to try and get a sense for, as you say, personalist policy, what kinds of ideological framework she believes in or might pursue as president. | |
| What is it that you learned by taking a look at that? | |
| Yeah, just as the article states, personnel choices can be the best predictors of actual policy. | |
| Politicians say a lot on the campaign trail, but who they pick to carry out that agenda matters a lot. | |
| Take a look at Obama selecting former bank attorneys for his Justice Department, and that kind of signaled him not permanently prosecuting the big banks after the financial crisis, or Donald Trump selecting a former Raytheon lobbyist as his Secretary of Defense. | |
| Not really following through with his promises to crack down on defense fraud. | |
| But Kamala Harris, you know, looking at her close inner circle, she's kind of portrayed herself with the iconography of the civil rights movement, of, you know, kind of radical movements from the 60s and 70s. | |
| As you mentioned in the previous segment, she's gestured to the progressive left a lot, especially in her 2020 presidential campaign. | |
| But her inner circle has never been radical. | |
| She's never really brought in activists or people from the progressive left to advise her campaign or to staff her. | |
| Many of her closest aides have gone on to lobby for corporate interests. | |
| Many of them have left the vice president's office to work with big tech companies. | |
| And most crucially, and we just had breaking news a few hours ago, that her brother-in-law, Tony West, That breaking news on the screen. | |
| It's an Axios report. | |
| at Uber, is informally one of the most significant advisors to her current presidential campaign. | |
| He's helping shape the hires, shape the direction of that. | |
| That breaking news on the screen, it's an Axios report. | |
| Kamala Harris's brother-in-law emerges as a key campaign advisor. | |
| And as you said, he's the general counsel at a major corporation, Uber, that has fallen into a lot of scandal in terms of how it mistreats its workers, its refusal to give basic workers' rights at somebody to whom she's very close and who's a major factor and figure in her campaign. | |
| Well, it's not just that. | |
| He's not just a general counsel. | |
| He's helped engineer massive political victories for the company that's helped bring the company into profitability, help its growth. | |
| In California, he helped engineer the massive ballot measure, the most expensive corporate campaign or any campaign on the statewide level in our history. | |
| And that's to change the California state constitution to make it to remove the ability for ride share drivers, people who drive the cars for Uber and Lyft to be able to join a union or to qualify for minimum wage. | |
| It was a very cutthroat campaign. | |
| They paid civil rights groups and groups associated with people of color, LGBT, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and others to basically argue that anyone who opposed this uber-drafted ballot measure was a bigot that didn't care about vulnerable people. | |
| It was very aggressive, and they messaged that campaign, and they were stunningly successful. | |
| Before we get to some of the other points about Kamala, let me just ask you about that last point because I think it's something people haven't understood. | |
| I've been wanting to do a report on this for a while and just haven't gotten to it, but it kind of goes back to Al Sharpton and even before that a little bit with Jesse Jackson where people who proclaim the right to speak on behalf of marginalized and minority groups wielded this huge weapon, which is that they could label people racist or defend people from the racism accusation in a way that could either bolster or destroy someone's reputation. | |
| And that became a very valuable commodity, especially Al Sharpton would often leverage that power that he had to tell major corporations, if you donate money to my organization, I'll refrain from calling you a racist or even we'll defend you. | |
| You know, we've seen similar things to the way the Anti-Defamation League forces people who are being accused of anti-Semitism to donate to the ADL in order to be cleared by that group of anti-Semitism. | |
| A lot of like black members of Congress leave Congress and become lobbyists for major corporations in very lucrative ways and as you say they often take Pro-corporate positions and defend them by accusing people who oppose the corporation's positions or who defend workers' rights as being racist. | |
| They kind of reframe it as paid lobbyists for these major corporations that exploit this racism and bigotry narrative that they had previously worked on as activists. | |
| Just talk a little bit about that because I know you've written a lot about that and have been interested in that for a while. | |
| It's really this dynamic that you're discussing is a defining part of some of the corporate lobbying or public affairs industry. | |
| It's a jujitsu kind of move where they take this rhetoric, the social justice rhetoric that helped define justice movements, labor movements, the progressive left since the 1960s, and they kind of turn it on its head. | |
| They weaponize it and turn it into a cudgel, these accusations of bigotry or, you know, not standing for people of color or vulnerable communities. | |
| And they turn it into a weapon on behalf of corporations. | |
| And there are major lobbyists and major consultants. | |
| It's now a routine aspect in major public affairs campaigns. | |
| There are specialized firms that basically only do this, that help work with nuclear energy companies, big banks. | |
| Of course, the big tech industry is notorious for this. | |
| You know, it's not just Uber, but Google and Amazon have a history of hiring firms that, you know, when folks have called for antitrust or greater privacy protections for users or, you know, the list goes on of other kind of reforms that have been attempted on big tech. | |
| they corral, the big companies corral Third party validators is what they call it. | |
| Third parties that use the politics of identity against the regulators, against the kind of progressives calling for these reforms to obscure the issue at hand. | |
| Instead of talking about, you know, are these companies too big? | |
| Are they exploiting their workers? | |
| We're talking about who's a racist and who's not. | |
| And it's really a mental shortcut that has divided our politics and really served the interests of the money class in this country for a very long time, especially in California where these politics are very salient. | |
| I want to ask you about certain divisions in the Democratic Party to try and understand where Kamala Harris might, the side on which she might fall. | |
| I've noticed this dynamic before that Democrats often look at the American right and the Republican Party as this monolith. | |
| They don't understand all the very vibrant political differences within the Republican polity and right-wing politics. | |
| They don't understand why Trump supporters hate Mitch McConnell or why people who love Paul Ryan hate Donald Trump. | |
| These represent very distinctive versions of American conservatism that people on the Democratic Party side often don't see. | |
| And similarly, people on the American right tend to ignore or not see divisions within the Democratic Party. | |
| They're just all leftist or communist or whatever. | |
| And these divisions are very significant or can be as we've seen in the 2016 protracted civil war where supporters of Bernie Sanders and supporters of Hillary Clinton hated each other and had real differences. | |
| One of the premises that I think a lot of people who watch Democratic Party politics have is that there aren't many differences between the Obama administration and the Biden administration. | |
| There's continuity on foreign policy and even economic policy, but to the extent there are differences, there are some that are kind of meaningful, namely that Joe Biden has been more pro-worker and more pro-labor. | |
| He has appointments like Lena Kahn, who's become controversial, who's definitely more opposed to the centralization of corporate power at the expense of consumers and the marketplace, to the point where J.D. Vance is actually praising Lena Kahn, but major Democratic donors are demanding to the point where J.D. Vance is actually praising Lena Kahn, but | |
| And so there's a sense that Joe Biden is slightly more, I guess we can say, populist in his economic policies and the people whom he's appointed than the Obama administration is, which is much closer to Silicon Valley, much more pro-corporate, much more neoliberal. | |
| at all. | |
| To the extent that those differences are real, and I want you to talk about them, with which faction do you think Kamala Harris is likely to align more? | |
| Look, in terms of Biden, Biden has, you know, in the last few months, there's been this focus on his inner circle, and he's become more cloistered behind the men who have been advising him for years. | |
| And to his credit, really, putting aside the cognitive decline or health issues that have been reported, Biden historically has brought in an ideologically mixed group of close advisors. | |
| So he's got folks on more of the progressive left, more aligned with labor unions and working class concerns, people like Ron Klein and Jared Bernstein, people more on the neoliberal pro-business side, people like Bruce Reed and Steve Ricchetti. | |
| This is the close inner circle with Biden. | |
| He kind of pings, reportedly, he pings ideas between all these men. | |
| And here's the different perspectives as he develops policy. | |
| Now for Kamala, for what we know from her historic kind of record with advisors and consultants, was more of the pro-business side. | |
| And you hear a daily kind of trickle of news about who she's hiring to run her campaign. | |
| It's Eric Holder, you know, from Covington & Burling, the former AG for Obama, who was very close to big business. | |
| Anita Dunn, who was another Obama, a campaign advisor for Biden, whose firm has done corporate public affairs for Pfizer and Lyft and many other kind of big industries, big companies. | |
| And of course, her brother-in-law and the lower level consultants, people from Precision Strategies, another kind of public affairs firm that serves corporate interests. | |
| We don't see So far, anyone notable who's an economist or a big thinker from the progressive left, the more populist side or anti-corporate, corporate accountability side, who are joining Kamala Harris in her circle, her main consulting firm that advised her when she ran for AG, ran for Senate, ran for President, and probably will play another role here, Bear Star Strategies. | |
| It's a California firm. | |
| Again, it's a firm that's closer to business interests. | |
| It's not from the progressive left. | |
| Yeah, I want to just probe a little bit more deeply on that because I think there's this conception, almost subconscious, both on the American right and the center, and even on the American left, that somehow almost instinctively believes that non-white politicians, especially black women, are almost like inherently or reflexively more left-wing than say white male Democrats. | |
| It's like almost a kind of instinctive assumption that operates on the subconscious level. | |
| I think a lot of left-wing supporters of the Democratic Party are trying to exploit that perception to pretend that Kamala Harris is more left-wing. | |
| than she actually is. | |
| And in fact, we've seen the Congressional Black Caucus and a lot of establishment black politicians who overwhelmingly sided with Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate over Bernie Sanders, who was the more populous candidate in 2016. | |
| One of the things, though, that I find so amazing, and I'm wondering what your view is, this is sort of the first segment, that we shouldn't have to be sitting here doing the kind of investigative work that you did in this article where we have to figure out what, where she's likely to side with because, you know, we should know, for example, Joe Biden appointed Lena Kahn, he's defended her from attacks, | |
| And then on the other hand you have Kamala Harris's biggest donors like Reid Hoffman and other corporate tycoons demanding the firing of Lena Khan. | |
| An obvious thing that would happen in any normal presidential campaign was that Kamala Harris would sit down for an interview and someone would say to her, Hey, what do you think of Lena Kahn? | |
| Do you think she's been doing a good job of rejuvenating antitrust law? | |
| Or do you think she's been abusing it and excessively over-interpreting it in order to impede corporate innovation? | |
| And then we wouldn't have to guess at these things, because then she would say, yeah, I agree, maybe Lena Kahn has gone too far, or no, I think she's actually done a great job. | |
| But since we don't have that, We're left here to guess. | |
| I feel like I'm going crazy that more people aren't disturbed by this or kind of astonished at how somebody who's now the presidential nominee of a major party three months before the election has not had to answer any questions at all, even as major wars were on the verge of exploding in the Middle East. | |
| What do you think of that? | |
| Is that something that is as confounding to you as it is to me? | |
| It's confounding. | |
| It's frustrating. | |
| But in a way, it's the California way. | |
| It's the form of politics we practice here in the Bay Area and in California for a very long time that Perhaps we're projecting now on the country. | |
| So to get back a little bit to her personnel, because I think this is interesting. | |
| I've noticed a pattern here. | |
| Her consultants, Bear Star Strategies, they're not really known in Washington, but they dominate here in California. | |
| They ran the campaigns of our former mayors in San Francisco, ran the campaigns for Gavin Newsom, for Jerry Brown, for Kamala Harris. | |
| One of the most Democratic congressional seats in the entire country is in the Bay Area. | |
| It's the Berkeley seat that's being vacated by Barbara Lee. | |
| They're running the person who's likely to win that seat, Latifah Simon. | |
| Now, what's the common thread here with Alex Padilla, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris? | |
| Look at their campaign sites. | |
| There's no issue page. | |
| There's nothing about their policies or where they stand, and they're very clever in deploying left-leaning culture war. | |
| You know, Gavin Newsom, of course, ran abortion-related ads in Florida, knowing that he could tweak Ron DeSantis and generate endless headlines for himself and perhaps fundraising. | |
| Kamala Harris has leaned on her identity and talked about her identity quite a bit and especially her surrogates have played it up. | |
| We see this kind of politics of identity and culture war on the left that can galvanize voters and certainly generate media attention that seems to obscure the fact that there's no discussion with reporters, there's no press conference, there's no policy position on their website. | |
| So it seems to be an intentional strategy to kind of stop to prevent or curb scrutiny and to not have the discussion that we've been having over the last half an hour of where she actually stands. | |
| Let me ask you about California politics, because just like I think there's an assumption that black women are automatically sort of more left wing. | |
| I think there's an also assumption that people who come from California, a very blue state known for, you know, Hollywood leftists or whatever, but also specifically from San Francisco are people who are almost assuredly very left wing. | |
| I remember in the 80s during the Reagan era and then into the early 90s, you know, the famous notorious Pat Buchanan speech where he audited, often talked about what he called the San Francisco Democrats because the Democrats just had their convention at San Francisco to kind of signify this far-leftist, Marxist, degenerate type of left-wing Democrat. | |
| San Francisco was a stand-in for that. | |
| They often talked about Nancy Pelosi that way because she was from San Francisco as though she was some far-leftist when in reality you can't find a more pro-establishment candidate or politician than she. | |
| So what, in terms of Kamala Harris's early part of her career, the thing that led to her emergence, her election as the District Attorney of San Francisco and then her big step up to Attorney General and then again to the Senate, who is it, | |
| what kind of people have actually financed that what kind of people have actually financed that huge amount of money that you need to run a statewide race in California and where are those kind of people at the core of the Democratic Party in California situated on this spectrum? | |
| from. | |
| Well, I'm glad you bring that up because earlier you were mentioning how much the left and Democrats misunderstand about the right and the fractures and the ideological competition. | |
| There's a similar dynamic that happens with the right, with conservative media and some Republicans, that no matter where you are in the country, if you're running a race in South Carolina or Missouri or Michigan, you're a Republican, you kind of call attention to any San Francisco connection your Democrat opponent has. | |
| Saying San Francisco liberal or progressive is a slur, but it obscures the divisions within San Francisco, this kind of political milieu that has produced Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi and many others, Dianne Feinstein. | |
| When Kamala Harris was running for office in 2003, along with Gavin Newsom, the city was deeply divided. | |
| The incumbent District Attorney Terrence Hallinan came from a communist background. | |
| He's truly left-wing. | |
| His critics said he was too lenient on crime. | |
| Gavin Newsom was running against a very strong Green Party. | |
| Back then, there was a very strong Green Party in San Francisco. | |
| And they were seen as the right wing candidates, as the conservative kind of Pacific Heights, old money elite. | |
| You know, the old the Getty family, the old oil fortune and others had funded them to take on these left wing politicians in San Francisco. | |
| And Kamala Harris, you read her quotes from that campaign. | |
| She was promising to get tough on criminals. | |
| She was sending flyers to people's homes with the kind of classic tough on crime campaigning that is now kind of decried as racist or kind of insensitive in modern times. | |
| You know, showing like a chalk line or, you know, a tattooed gang member, Latino gang member with a gun saying, you know, is your family safe? | |
| You need elect me to get tough on criminals. | |
| And she was working with Gavin Newsom to roll back parts of the sanctuary citizen, sanctuary city policy in San Francisco, essentially arguing that if you're a juvenile who's undocumented, if you're just charged with a crime, not even convicted, the city should be referring you to ICE for deportation. | |
| So that was the Kamala back then, the tough on crime Kamala. | |
| And it really, she was at war with the progressives in the city. | |
| She was even saying that we needed to get tough on anti-war protesters because the city was beset by anti-Iraq war demonstrations all the time back then. | |
| So, and I know this is speculative, but do you think of all these different versions of Kamala Harris? | |
| Like the New York Times was talking about, oh, the Kamala Harris of 2020 does not exist anymore. | |
| We have a new version of Kamala Harris. | |
| And there's this Kamala Harris back from back in the day when she was in her early part of her career and then running for the Senate as well. | |
| Is there like a core belief systems somewhere in there? | |
| Or is she just one of those kind of people who are just so opportunistic and careerist that she's willing to jettison even her supposedly most firmly held convictions the minute there's the slightest political advantage in doing so? | |
| Well, you know, it's hard for me to say what's in her heart. | |
| From her record, it seems that when she actually had power, you know, it's one thing to be in the Senate and to co-sponsor bills that you know are going nowhere and to campaign at a CNN town hall and claim that you support Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren style ideas. | |
| When she, you know, as a prosecutor, as DA or AG, you have a lot more discretion in terms of who you go after and what kind of laws you prioritize in the jurisdiction. | |
| And it seemed like in those positions, she was very business friendly. | |
| She was much more kind of getting more prone to get tough on violent crime. | |
| on immigration, perhaps she was just responding to political incentives. | |
| I don't know. | |
| But when she had the choice of carrying out policies that actually affected people, not just co-sponsoring bills that were sitting in political no-man's land, I think perhaps the slightly more conservative, pro-business, centrist Kamala is closer to the real one. | |
| That being said, it's a big asterisk. | |
| We don't know. | |
| Like you said, she hasn't taken questions from reporters and she hasn't really articulated where she truly stands. | |
| I would also add that I wouldn't underestimate her. | |
| If you look at her career, she's very savvy in terms of positioning herself. | |
| One standard kind of speech line that she gives in her stump speeches is that she created the first environmental justice unit. | |
| She was very early to talk about racial equity and issues around corporate law enforcement. | |
| This was back in 2004, 2005, and she still talks about it today. | |
| Pearl Book being smart on crime rather than tough on crime, it's savvy messaging. | |
| But if you peel back the layers of the onion of what she actually did, in terms of her environmental justice unit, she claimed that she used it to go after big industrial polluters who were polluting African-American neighborhoods in San Francisco and elsewhere. | |
| If you look at the actual record, she didn't bring any charges against the industrial polluters. | |
| In fact, she only prosecuted a few small-time defendants. | |
| But it was very savvy rhetoric in terms of positioning yourself for the future of the Democratic Party. | |
| Let me ask you this last question, because I do think it's interesting, obviously the Republicans were planning on running against a Joe Biden nomination and candidacy, since he's the one who actually got the votes in the Democratic primary to become the nominee. | |
| And I think it's pretty obvious that ever since it became apparent that Joe Biden wouldn't be the candidate and instead Kamala Harris would, that they've been kind of trying to feel around for how best to attack her. | |
| And it seems like, and this is sort of disappointing and I hope this changes, but to me it seems like as opposed to 2016 when Trump so successfully rejected this kind of bipartisan consensus in Washington and sort of got rid of the idea of like liberal versus conservative or Republican versus Democrat and pointed out that there's actually just this pro-establishment swamp in Washington | |
| In both political parties it just needs to be burnt down and what is a much better way of understanding politics, and I think this came from Steve Bannon, is who is pro-establishment and who is anti-establishment. | |
| And in that way you could actually criticize Kamala Harris because all the things you're describing to me, more than left or right or centrist or whatever, just seems like she's an arm and tool of establishment interest, which is a really good way to advance politically if you want big money and you want the support of a lot of people. | |
| It seems though like at least up to now what they're intent on doing is instead just like calling her a far leftist like the sort of political campaigning that Republicans have done you know since the 1960s and 70s where you know Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern and Walter Mondale and Michael Takagi they were all just like far leftist this far leftist that | |
| And I don't feel like, A, that's going to work on Kamala because she's not actually a far leftist and really never has been, and B, it just seems like Trump is abandoning the framework that he so successfully embraced and gave voice to in 2016 and is returning to this old, stale, archaic, partisan way of talking about politics. | |
| What do you think is the best way to try and run against Kamala and to depict her negatively? | |
| Look, the 2024 Trump campaign is sounding a little bit like the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign, where instead of talking about the job losses and the deference to big banks and big business interests from the Obama administration's first four years, | |
| Romney campaign was only talking about this kind of typical, you know, this is, Obama's a far left progressive, he's an extremist leftist, why isn't he bringing, why isn't he engaging in more wars, this kind of neoconservative critique. | |
| And Trump has abandoned his 2016 style. | |
| And perhaps it's actually another case of personnel playing a big role here, because Steve Bannon is not at the center of this campaign. | |
| Instead, it's individuals like Susie Wiles, who is a lobbyist, a longtime Florida lobbyist at the corporate consulting firm Mercury Strategies. | |
| And Trump's other co-campaign manager, Chris Lasivita, is a longtime establishment Republican super PAC guy. | |
| He's run campaigns for various establishment Republicans. | |
| He was a big player in the Bush re-election campaign. | |
| And Trump, you know, it's hard to kind of distill the reason for his behavior, that he's, you know, sounding like a neoconservative, hitting kind of the same notes as a typical Republican. | |
| But perhaps it's also a reason the personnel is also a reason. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And maybe it's also that. | |
| People assume that you can depict Kamala successfully as a sort of far leftist in these Midwest battleground states, in part because of that perception that black women are just automatically sort of out of the mainstream and on the far left. | |
| And I think Trump's selection of J.D. | |
| Vance as Vice President gave some false hope that maybe he was going back in this more populist direction that worked so well for him in 2016. | |
| I think it was just that the last people he spoke to were people like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. | |
| and some of these Silicon Valley backers who have a more populist flavor to them when it comes to the war, who were encouraging him to pick J.D. | |
| Vance, but it hasn't really changed the central It's always great to see you. | |
| Thanks for coming on. | |
| Good to see you, Glenn. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| of 2024. | |
| All right, Lee, it's always so great to see you. | |
| And it's especially true when you do some reporting that I think deserves a lot of attention. | |
| I hope people will check out your sub stack and subscribe to it and support it. | |
| And I hope you're doing well. | |
| And it's always great to see you. | |
| Thanks for coming on. | |
| Good to see you, Glenn. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| All right. | |
| Take care. | |
| If you work in politics or journalism for a long enough period of time, you will sort of get to see that every political faction has its horrible attributes, has its terrible people within them. | |
| And sometimes it's very difficult to pick the worst one. | |
| But having covered American politics for almost 20 years on a very in-depth I can honestly say that I think the most pathetic political faction in American politics is the faction of people who call themselves leftist and yet nonetheless define their political identity as unconditional loyalty to the Democratic Party. | |
| I just want to spend a little time showing you just how pathetic this wing of the Democratic Party is. | |
| They're the kind of people who I Indicated aren't the real leftists who refuse to vote for Democrats And instead vote for people like Jill Stein. | |
| They're not the people who go around saying that what Biden has been doing in Gaza is genocide and then say, I'm going to vote for Biden anyway, even though he's guilty of genocide. | |
| They're the people who really, that's the left that really believes that rhetoric. | |
| These are the people who are basically just Democrats and then sort of define themselves as being to the left of the Democratic Party. | |
| And obviously the big issue, the big criticism of the Democratic Party for the left wing of this party over the past 10 months has been, Joe Biden's unstinting, unyielding support for the state of Israel and its destruction of Gaza. | |
| Arming them, funding them, isolating the United States diplomatically to do so. | |
| Very consistent with Joe Biden's 50 years in American politics where he's always been one of the most vocal pro-Israel politicians in all of Washington. | |
| Now, the question of what Kamala Harris thinks about all of these things is, like everything about her as we've been covering tonight, somewhat mysterious because she, again, hasn't had to say, answer basic questions like, would you have done anything different than what Biden did when it came to supporting Israel in the war in Gaza? | |
| Would you have imposed more restrictions? | |
| Would you have threatened to remove arms and financial support? | |
| In a more aggressive way, would you have actually removed that support? | |
| Would you do so if you're president? | |
| We just don't, again, know anything that she thinks. | |
| The one thing we do know, however, is that one of her very first acts when she got to the Senate in 2017 was she was one of the main co-sponsors in denouncing the Obama administration. | |
| As you might remember, Obama on his way out in 2016, largely I think because of personal animus to Benjamin Netanyahu, refused to do what the United States typically does at the UN, which is use his veto power to prevent any anti-Israel resolutions from passing the Security Council. | |
| And instead Obama refused to use his veto power and allowed a resolution at the U.N. | |
| and the Security Council to pass that basically declared Israeli occupation of the West Bank to be illegal. | |
| And the U.S. | |
| under Obama abstained on that and a lot of pro-Israel supporters were obviously enraged by what Obama did because typically the United States traditionally blocks any Security Council resolution that is critical of Israel. | |
| One of the very first things Kamala Harris did when she got to the Senate in 2017 was she became a leading sponsor of a resolution to condemn the Obama administration for having abstained on that anti-Israel resolution and instead insisting that the U.S. should have vetoed it. | |
| So she immediately took a leading pro-Israel role in 2017, way beyond what the Obama administration was. | |
| And the Obama administration was very supportive of Israel. | |
| And beyond that, we don't really know much of what she thinks. | |
| We know she went to AIPAC. | |
| She gave an ardently pro-Israel speech, swearing and vowing to always continue unstinting, unyielding U.S. | |
| support for Israel. | |
| Her husband is much more vocal and outspoken. | |
| on that issue than Xi. | |
| He's a hardcore Israel supporter, a self-identified Zionist who has long supported the Israeli government. | |
| But Xi never, during the last 10 months, has indicated even the slightest disagreement with Biden's policies. | |
| So you would think that people who have been going around accusing the Biden administration of engaging in genocide would be at least reluctant to vote for the administration that committed a genocide option Obviously, you have to vote in the U.S. | |
| for candidates with whom you disagree on some issues. | |
| That's obvious. | |
| But there should be, for any moral person, a red line that you can't cross is still Get the support of somebody. | |
| And you would think actually supporting and implementing a genocide, as the left has been accusing the Biden and Harris administration of doing, would be that line. | |
| But for a lot of these left wing members of the Democratic Party, they don't have any lines. | |
| They will support the Democratic Party as a matter of religious faith, as central to their identity, and they announced in advance that there's nothing the Democratic Party could do that would result in them not supporting the Democratic Party every two years or every four years. | |
| And that is true for a lot of these people who were pretending for a while to say, oh, we may not vote for Democrats in the 2024 election unless Biden changes his policy on Israel. | |
| Biden has not changed his policy on Israel and yet very predictably because of who they are and the complete lack of actual fixed beliefs about anything that they have. | |
| They position themselves to vote for Biden anyway, and they've justified it by saying, oh, we think Kamala Harris for some reason is slightly more pro-Palestinian than Joe Biden, even though there's no evidence of that. | |
| And the only signs of that are, if anything, she might even be more pro-Israel or at least as pro-Israel as Joe Biden is. | |
| Now, one of the things that I've never quite understood is that it's so basic to the way power in general is exercised, but especially political power, that in order to have any political power, you need to have leverage. | |
| And the only way you have leverage in politics is if you make clear that what someone wants from you is something you won't give them unless they do what you want. | |
| Politicians will pay very close attention to the desires and beliefs and positions of the group of people who aren't loyal to their party, of independents, of non-committed people. | |
| Oftentimes, a lot of centrists and right-wing people in the Democratic Party will say, I'm not going to give you my vote. | |
| I'm going to abandon you unless you appease my policy views. | |
| And the Democrats pay very close attention to those people because they know how to leverage political power. | |
| They know how to use political power. | |
| They don't say, I'm permanently enslaved to you and to your party. | |
| They say the opposite. | |
| They say, I'm only going to support you if you meet these demands that I have. | |
| And that's true in negotiations as well. | |
| If you sit down at a negotiating table to negotiate an agreement with somebody and you announce in advance that you're going to sign a deal no matter what the deal is, obviously no one's going to take seriously your demands. | |
| No one's going to care what your demand is because you've already said you won't walk away from the table. | |
| You've already told them, I'm going to sign whatever deal I can get. | |
| And so they're never going to give you a good deal because they know that you're never going to walk away. | |
| Why would they? | |
| They don't care what you think. | |
| You've already told them you're there to sign the deal no matter what. | |
| And this sector of the Democratic Party does exactly that. | |
| They announce in advance that no matter what the Democratic Party does, they will unconditionally and eternally show up every two years and vote Democrat no matter what happens. | |
| And obviously, that is the faction that everybody disrespects most. | |
| There's nothing more pathetic Then affirming your own unconditional subservience to people even when they spit on you, even when they express contempt for you, even when they give you nothing that you actually want. | |
| And that is the pro-DNC left in this country at its core. | |
| They're people who wield no power, who are totally impotent, nobody respects them, they don't understand anything about political power, therefore no one pays attention to them, no one cares what they want, no one cares what they think. | |
| As the New York Times said, Kamala Harris is showing in this election that she's more than willing to dump on the left wing of the Democratic Party, that she's more than willing to show how much she can't stand them, she's more than willing to throw them away. | |
| And why wouldn't she? | |
| That's a smart thing to do because she knows that those left wing supporters of the Democratic Party will vote for her no matter what she does or says to them. | |
| She could literally spit on them at every rally. | |
| She could go and look for people who identify as left-wing supporters of the Democratic Party and spit in their face. | |
| And they have said, even if you do that to me, I will still vote for you. | |
| And so, in part, that contempt is natural. | |
| We just don't respect people who sacrifice their dignity that way. | |
| But it's also politically wise. | |
| Why would you pay any attention, ever, to a political faction that has sworn eternal loyalty to you? | |
| You would obviously ignore them and never give them what they want, and instead focus on the people who actually have dignity, who are actually going to demand things that they want, and if you don't give it to them, they may not actually support you. | |
| Now, I just want to show you But one of the representatives of this faction has done over the past month, someone who actually fancies himself one of the leaders, like one of the elder statesmen of this movement, somebody who like, because he writes in some magazines like the New Republic and Jewish Currents, actually believes that he's of great influence, that he speaks on behalf of the left, he guides them and encourages them what to do. | |
| His name is David Kleon. | |
| And yes, he's not a very significant person, but this faction is not very significant for the reason that I just explained. | |
| But I just want to show you what he did. | |
| So, as you may have heard, The potential vice presidential picks for Kamala Harris have been narrowed down to just a few people. | |
| And this part of the left has decided that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is more pro-Israel or at least more hostile to the pro-Palestinian cause than the other potential vice presidential picks that Kamala Harris could make. | |
| And they've been accused, I think unjustly, of singling out Josh Shapiro because he's Jewish and have been accused of anti-Semitism. | |
| I think there's actually a good reason to think that Josh Shapiro is more hostile to the pro-Palestinian cause, to the right of pro-Palestinian protesters, given his long history. | |
| That other Democratic candidates aren't. | |
| So I think there's a good argument to make if you're actually a left-wing critic of the Democratic Party who believes that the Biden administration's policy is genocidal, that you would not want Josh Shapiro to be the vice presidential pick. | |
| But the way that the left-wing sector of the DNC, of the Democratic Party, has expressed its opposition almost guarantees that nobody will pay attention to them. | |
| I want to show you how David Cleon, again, one of the kind of self-anointed leaders of this completely irrelevant and impotent movement, has been expressing this desire not to have Josh Shapiro be Kamala Harris's pick. | |
| So on July 21st, just a few weeks ago, he went onto Twitter and he said this, quote, "We on the left," he's, I don't know why, thinking that he speaks for the left, "We on the left," he said, "have been good team players here, supporting Kamala as a consensus candidate before many centers Dems have. | |
| So he's telling the Democrats, look at what good boys and girls we are. | |
| We've been loyal to you. | |
| We've done what we are told. | |
| We have supported everything that you want. | |
| We actually are more loyal to Kamala than even centrists in the party were. | |
| We've been good boys and girls, good team players, he said. | |
| Imagine putting yourself in that posture, just the utter lack of dignity that requires to say, oh please look over here, please pay attention to me, not because I have political power and I'm willing to exercise it, but because I've been so submissive and obedient to you. | |
| And he then went on to say, but I think we need to stake out just one reasonable ask and it's this. | |
| Don't put Josh Shapiro on the ticket. | |
| He's worse than replacement level on Palestine. | |
| So he basically got down on his knees in front of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party, which is the natural and typical posture of this faction, and said, please recognize how loyal we are, how much service we give you, how valuable and useful we make ourselves to you, and please let us just beg for one thing, just a little bit, one little crumb, please, please, please, just don't put Josh Shapiro on the ticket. | |
| We'll accept any other pro-Israel vice presidential pick. | |
| We know that you, Kamala Harris, support this thing we've been calling a genocide, but we're still going to vote. | |
| Please, there's one little crumb. | |
| Just let us ask for one little thing. | |
| Beg for one little thing. | |
| Don't put Josh Shapiro on the ticket. | |
| So he tweeted it that way. | |
| And then he went to the New Republic and published this article. | |
| There you see July 24th. | |
| This is by David Cleon in the New Republic. | |
| The one vice presidential pick who could ruin democratic unity. | |
| Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is a leading candidate to be Kamala Harris' running mate. | |
| Selecting him would fracture the party. | |
| And he went on to claim very unpersuasively that if you choose a hardcore pro-Israel extremist like Josh Shapiro, man. | |
| Many people on the left, many young voters who are currently so excited over Kamala Harris, even though she's not supportive of Supporting Israel as anyone else in the party, but they're so excited about Kamala Harris. | |
| The people have been calling this a genocide. | |
| They're eager to vote for her even though she supports this genocide. | |
| But he argues Josh Shapiro would just be a bridge too far that he would be somebody who would fracture the party and diffuse this excitement that the left and Arab and Muslim voters have suddenly for the Democratic Party and for Kamala Harris, even though she supports what they call a genocide. | |
| So he wrote an article in the New Republic begging for this. | |
| He wrote a tweet begging for this. | |
| And then once it turned out that he saw signals that he believes strongly suggested that despite his begging, Josh Shapiro would actually be the choice of vice president, and there are even a lot more signals today, I think it's close to 90%, I would say, that he is actually the choice. | |
| But on July 30th, just a few days after he begged for the Democratic Party not to choose Josh Shapiro just to give the left one little crumb, he pointed to a bunch of signs that he interpreted as suggesting that Josh Shapiro would in fact be the vice president. | |
| In other words, that the Democrats and Kamala Harris would do exactly what he and his friends begged them, begged them not to do. | |
| And then in response, before he was even announced, this is what he said, quote, if this means what we all assume it means, pointing to these signs that Josh Peer would be the nominee, he said, I'm not going to be leading the effort to wreck the ticket. | |
| I've said my piece and I want to beat Trump. | |
| If the valid concerns I raised are considered manageable by the campaign, then good luck to them managing it. | |
| Do you see how pitiful these people are? | |
| How empty and pointless and pathetic and bereft of dignity they are? | |
| They tried to not leverage power and say, if you pick Josh Shapiro, we won't vote for you. | |
| You can make that threat and then still vote for Kamala Harris, and that way at least you're trying to leverage power. | |
| But they didn't do that. | |
| They said, we're good, loyal servants of you. | |
| And so just kind of as a byproduct of your benevolence, just give us this one little crumb. | |
| And then before it was even announced that Josh Shapiro would be the nominee, just them thinking that he might likely be, they already gave it the whole game up and they said, look, we know we asked you, we begged you not to pick Josh Shapiro, it seems like you're going to and we just want you to know that even if you pick Josh Shapiro, we're still going to do our duty and give you our vote and support you, which is exactly what Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party knew the left would do. | |
| They've seen the left pretend they're not going to support Democrats and then show up and vote Democrat every time they're the most easily manipulated, loyal, subservient people on the planet, which is why I say they're uniquely pitiful as a political faction. | |
| And that's exactly what they did. | |
| They pretended that they were not going to vote for Democrats this whole year because genocide was a red line for them. | |
| And maybe there's a few who actually followed through with that, but the prominent, relatively speaking, people who represent this movement I've made very clear they're going to vote for whoever the Democratic Party nominee is, even if they support quote-unquote genocide. | |
| But even on this issue, they said, just please, please. | |
| And then once they believed, even before it was announced that it was going to be Josh Shapiro, they went back and said, oh, don't worry about us. | |
| We know we asked you for this. | |
| And even if you ignore us and do exactly what we begged you not to do, we're still going to support you and be good team players. | |
| How do people like this not understand that the surest way to make yourself irrelevant, to ensure that nobody will care about what you think, is to turn yourselves into unconditional loyalists to a party? | |
| That's why I call them so pathetic, because if you actually had any conviction, if you actually had any beliefs about anything that you've been saying for the last 10 months, or just a basic understanding of how political power works, just basic personal dignity, You would not ever vow your eternal unconstitutional loyalty to any politician because the minute you do that, you make yourself what all of these people in fact are, the reason they have so much contempt for them and the way in which they conduct themselves. | |
| You turn yourselves into The people least deserving of respect, who have absolutely zero influence or power, who are like little dogs who, no matter what you do to them, always show up and wag their tail and continue to express their loyalty and love to you. | |
| And that may be a nice thing in a personal life. | |
| I think dogs are a great thing, but it's not a very effective way to exercise political power or to try and pretend that you have any real convictions. | |
| And none of these people do. | |
| And that's the reason why, despite the perception that I was somewhat associated with them 10 years ago or 15 years ago, I can barely think of a political group That is less deserving of any sort of respect and that's precisely why they got done. | |
| All right, so on that happy note, that concludes our show for this evening. | |
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