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Good Friday Morning! And a special welcome back to college football, which has finally returned this Labor Day weekend. We’ve already had a top-ten team lose, a random fumble bounce back into the offense’s hands for a big gain, and an interception bounce off a cornerback’s leg and land in another defender’s hands. The crazy has returned.
I’m back in the saddle this week with the YouTube channel. I had other work get extremely busy, so I couldn’t film. But I laid out my view of the election right now and how Trump and Harris view the polls behind the scenes.
This week, I’m going to touch on an issue that’s bugged me in the broader conservative discourse – “conserving conservatism.” David French brought it back to the forefront, declaring that he’ll vote for Kamala Harris. I’ll tackle that and more. Links will follow.
Quick Hits:
- I recorded The Horse Race on Wednesday and covered all the latest polling news, including some evidence that the race was leaning to where I thought it would: Harris was peaking, and there was evident things would shift towards the middle of September. Those were essentially my thoughts before hitting record, but it was nice seeing Mark Halperin and Nate Silver effectively make the same points. Silver thinks polling is slightly biased for Harris due to the convention. If you correct that, the race shifts back to Trump by around two points. Also, Nate Silver’s projected popular vote margin for Harris is the same as the RealClearPolitics average. Harris is running 0.7 points off from what she needs to win, according to Silver, and about 1.7 points off from what I think she needs. She’s running behind 2016 Clinton. The real race begins after Labor Day.
- CNN’s 18-minute, pre-recorded interview with Harris dropped Thursday evening. One of the most telling aspects that conservatives on X/Twitter picked up on was when Dana Bash asked Harris questions about why she changed her political positions. But when asking those questions, she offered possible answers to Harris to make it easier. Bash asked a long-winded question, musing about whether or not Harris got more experience, was better informed, or had simply been playing primary politics in 2019. Harris rejected all options and said, “My values have never changed.” In other words, Harris claims her full progressive past instead of this progressive image. One interview down, and it’s readily apparent that Harris can’t even take a tee-ball question. Dana Bash tried spoon-feeding a decent answer to Harris, and she rejected it.
- On a related note, when Harris first entered the race, she demanded that Trump attend the debate he had agreed to with Biden. Trump rejected it at first, claiming he hadn’t agreed to a debate with her. Eventually, he just decided to accept it, and with that all the original terms of the debate. In the last week, the Harris campaign has scrambled to try and change the debate rules. Leaked correspondence from ABC News shows that ABC News rejected the Harris campaign’s new pitch on rules changes last minute. The Harris economic agenda rollout has been a disaster. CNBC hosts mocked Harris officials off the air over the proposal to tax unrealized gains, and now the CNN interview appears to be a dud. The scrambling over debate rules at the last minute is a red flag. Harris’s campaign hacks do not want her in an unscripted situation. They’re going to get exactly that in the debate (unless the moderators feed Harris the questions). The refusal of Harris to do more interviews and be ready is raising the stakes of interviews and debates. Her campaign is trying to prop her up for one big debate play, like attacking Joe Biden over bussing. They won’t agree to any other debates after that.
- This week, I encountered a viral dancer on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The video caught my eye because something seemed off after a few seconds. I looked closer and immediately knew that this was an AI-created video. Several key points: the audience in the back has poorly done hands and movements, and the woman herself has several motion blur issues, with body parts and shoes randomly changing. AI videos have an uncanny valley feel to them. However, it was an AI creation based on a real dancer with real accounts. You can see the original dance here. The AI was able to mimic many of the general themes of the dance, but it was smoother than a real-life dancer. AI-created influencers are coming – and they’ll be based on real influencers. I’m curious if some of these influencers know that they’re training their replacements with all the social media posts.
Where you can find me this week
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Horse Race Ep: 008: Trump vs Harris | Why The Polls Are Bad | September Surprises
Kamala Harris And The Run-Out-The-Clock Strategy – Conservative Institute
American Government Joins Assault On Free Speech – Conservative Institute
Trump Honors Fallen Dead While Biden-Harris Ignore Them – Conservative Institute
On David French and Defeatism Conservatism
Conservative intellectuals have had multiple rows over the past few weeks over more David French idiocy. It started with French writing an op-ed in the New York Times saying he was voting for Harris to “save conservatism from itself.” He followed that up by making a “pro-life case for Kamala Harris.” In other words, this is a full-tilt
Dan McLaughlin lit the French case on fire in two pieces (here and here). Charles C. W. Cooke invited David French onto his podcast to hash the topic out. Cooke flat-destroyed French in the podcast in the most friendly way you’ll ever hear.
French’s arguments are… weak. And I buy none of them. All you have to do is point David French to statements he made pre-Trump, and you get the answers to all his current nonsense. It’s so bad that it’s not even respectable. I’m fine with conservatives who don’t want to vote for Trump; I’ve been there, and I know people still like it, and that’s fine. But don’t gaslight me on reasons.
To date, there’s not a single restriction Kamala Harris would support on abortion. As California Attorney General, Harris went out of her way to attack pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in California. She attacked them on speech grounds. It took a Supreme Court ruling to stop the rampant idiocy in California.
None of this is to say Trump is a pro-lifer or even conservative. But there’s a chasm between him and Harris on this issue that cannot be squared.
But the point I want to drive home about French is the concept of “saving conservatism” or “conserving conservatism.” You see this from French, Bill Kristol, and the Bulwark crowd. It’s a nice-sounding phrase that is utterly nonsensical when analyzed historically.
In a novel, the great Jewish U.K. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once wrote, “There was indeed a considerable shouting about what they called Conservative principles; but the awkward question naturally arose, what will you conserve?”
He mocked the conservatives of his day because they couldn’t define what they’d conserve. If they could, it varied so widely that it was meaningless as a cohesive movement.
What French means by this is a form of American politics, or a Republican Party, that is utterly devoid of “Trump” or “Trumpism.” It’s a set of fairytale beliefs that were never true to begin with and never will be true in the future. It’s not so much that Trump himself will define the Republican Party forever; that’s not true of any politician. But rather than the branch of the right he represents has always been in the Republican Party, in the form of Eisenhower and Nixon (among others).
Modern conservatism, which peaked under Reagan and tried to maintain power through the 1990s and 00s, was new to the scene. It didn’t so much take over, as George H. Nash argues in his classic history of conservatism, as it did rent the Republican Party. Nixon’s failure to solve the inflation crisis, which ballooned under Carter, and the Watergate scandal wrecked that side of the party, which prepped the way for Reagan.
Reagan’s victory was through, no question. Reagan solved the major issues of his time: inflation and economic malaise and defeated the USSR. Reagan’s heirs wrecked conservatism in much the same way Nixon did. In the 2000s, George W. Bush and Republican majorities oversaw response to the economy and helped trigger (with a major assist from Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve) the Great Financial Crisis from 07-09.
The “conserving conservatism” crowd should have started their project then. At no point did the heirs to Reagan grapple with what happened after the GFC – I’ve read better breakdowns from that crisis from the left in places like the Brookings Institution, which points heavily to things like Greenspan and specific White House policies.
The heirs to Reagan floated from the crisis straight to the Tea Party and pretended that everything was fine. What they missed was that the Tea Party kicked out Republican incumbents. There was a massive purge of everyone who took part in the bailouts and supported Obama’s continuing those bailouts.
It’s easy to look at the Tea Party and think it was all about Obamacare. But the Tea Party began as a rant from CNBC reporter Rick Santelli blasting the Obama administration for trying to give mortgage bailouts directly to Americans. The country was fed up with bailouts by that point. Obama had bailed out the banks and done nothing to prosecute the bad actors in that age, and the Federal Reserve was pumping up the banks even more (a task it would continue non-stop for more than a decade).
The path to Donald Trump begins in the ashes of the Great Financial Crisis. Republicans had failed at a critical moment, and Reagan’s economic program, which George W. Bush pushed, was seen as a culprit. The conserving conservatism group never dealt with the philosophical fallout from that.
Greenspan ran the economy hotter than average with Congressional legislation to juice the housing market. That created the bubble, which ran wild until it peaked in 2006 and began a slow implosion through 2007. When the markets officially tanked in the fall of 2008, we’d already been in a recession for nearly a year by that point.
But Obama failed, too. In the Great Depression, FDR’s New Deal caused Americans to buy back into the American system. That inoculated us from the curse of “isms” running rampant on the European continent that gave rise to communism, fascism, and Nazism.
The inflation crisis of the late 60s and 70s crippled the American economy. After every recession, unemployment settled at a rate higher than before. The Federal Reserve kept approaching inflation with kid gloves, pulling interest rates back (with Nixon’s encouragement).
Carter was incompetent at handling everything. His failure after just four years is astonishing after the implosion of the Republican Party in the wake of Watergate. Reagan helped. He, like FDR, got Americans to buy back into the system of the United States just like FDR’s New Deal. He tapped into that exhaustment with nearly 15 years of a lousy economy, and people responded. The Federal Reserve got serious about tackling inflation, and together with Reagan’s supply-side economics (and a double-dip recession), the issue was solved, and we had standard economic growth until the GFC of 07-09.
FDR and Reagan answered the crisis of their time and got people to buy back in. Obama campaigned on hope and change, and Americans bought in for a while, but ultimately, it led to mass disillusionment in the American system. And here we are with Donald Trump and his attacks on the system being rigged, and Americans have a natural belief he’s right.
Reagan’s heirs and American elites’ inability to grapple with the fallout of the GFC has brought us to the Trump era. What’s so comical about the Biden-Harris coalition is that it doesn’t have any real answers. It’s even less substantive than the Obama administration. Harris has no real platform; it’s literally a “vibes-only campaign,” as the press is calling it.
That brings me back to David French. What is utterly annoying about all his self-righteous positions on politics is that he’s never grappled with the history or philosophy of the movement he claims to want to represent. Trump’s isolationist and protectionist tendencies fit in with the Nixonian wing of the Republican Party. His cultural liberalism matches liberal Republicans from the Northeast.
What French wants has never existed and never will. The sad irony is that the solution to our current inflation crisis needed Reagan-style answers. We had a supply-chain crisis. The government needed to pivot policy into the supply side. Instead, Biden did what all Democrats do: boost demand through government spending, cranking inflation higher.
Last point: conservatism exists to conserve countries, people, and systems. Conservatism cannot conserve itself. To do so shifts the importance of conservation onto itself instead of the country it allegedly serves. That’s why conservatism varies so widely depending on the country you’re in. They answer the “what are you conserving” question differently.
Our answers to that question differ from Reagan’s, too. The cultural issues Americans face now are radically different. The economic warfare the Chinese use to try and gain an edge over America is different from that of the USSR. If Reagan were in our moment, he’d look and sound different because he’d respond to different things.
French is pushing a dead-end agenda, where he’s the only pure enough to exist. It’s the ultimate form of defeatism. It’s got him so confused now that he’s supporting a woman who opposes everything in the conservative agenda from the last 25 years. David French preserves nothing but his own pride. And he’s too blind to see that now.
Links of the week
Two foreign men are charged with ‘swatting’ U.S. elected officials and private citizens – AJC
‘I Did Fries’: Kamala Harris Claims She Worked at McDonald’s, but She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President. Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches? – Washington Free Beacon
Inside Megyn Kelly’s YouTube success – Semafor
Chuck Todd Says Kamala Harris’s Media Strategy Will Backfire: ‘First Big Mistake’ – Mediaite
Trump rips Kamala Harris’ first sitdown interview since Biden dropped out: ‘Rambled incoherently’ – NYPost
Kamala Harris claims she will ‘not ban fracking’ as president in major policy flip-flop – NYPost
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Walz blames stolen valor news stories as “bad grammar” when talking.
Northern lights combine with erupting volcano.
CNBC hosts mock Harris campaign aide off air.
Chart shows how campus protests are perfectly correlated with class.
Satire of the week
Iowa State Fair Visitor Gored By 500-Pound Yam – Onion
Man’s Therapist Suggests He May Just Have An Abusive Relationship With His Favorite Sports Team – Babylon Bee
Kamala Policy Page Now Just Redirects To Trump’s Website – Babylon Bee
Woman’s Entire Belief System Rattled After the Weather App Got the Weather Wrong – Reductress
Report: Nearly Half of Burning Man Attendees Don’t Have Enough of Their Parents’ Money Saved to Go This Year – The Hard Times
Uh Oh: I Won an Argument with My Boss, but His Theme Is Still Playing – The Hard Drive
Self Service Checkout Manufacturers Finally Sued For False Advertising – Waterford Whispers News
Thanks for reading!