The media haven’t been interested in providing voters with much of a picture of Kamala Harris beyond “vibes.”
So I did the work for them and went back through what she’s actually said and done on policy and beyond.
It isn’t a pretty picture. Follow along ⤵️
There’s nowhere better to start than on immigration. Back in 2020, Harris was among the Dem candidates who supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Now @politico claims she “promised to go tough on border security.”
Color me skeptical.
Especially considering she supported eliminating ICE, tried to stop production on the border wall, and otherwise unwind the Trump policies that actually reduced illegal immigration.
And yet, Biden made her the top U.S. voice on immigration, much as she may now deny it.
Lots has been said on her
fracking stance. @EENewsUpdates said she had “flipped the script” on the policy.
When asked in 2020, she was unequivocal: “there’s no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.”
Seems an unlikely change!
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg on climate.
In that same 2020 @CNN “climate emergency town hall,” she pushed to pass the Green New Deal by nuking the filibuster, attacking oil and gas companies for supposed sins against the climate, and advocated plastic straws.
Then, tied to climate, there’s her support for offshoring our manufacturing, as @JDVance calls out.
While shipping jobs overseas, she’s pushed mandates for electric vehicles and used your tax dollars to support them.
This is the same Harris who wanted to defund the police.
She’ll try to pretend otherwise, but she endorsed the movement, as well as “reimagining” and otherwise diverting police resources.
Is this someone you want to elect?
I mean. She endorsed the bail fund that supported violent rioters in the Summer of 2020.
Remember this tweet? Remember the American cities that burned?
The press endeavored to make you forget. I hope you didn’t.
Harris is much tougher on law-abiding citizens, though.
Don’t forget, she said should take take executive action to ban so-called assault weapons and pushed for a gun seizure (“mandatory buyback”)
And what about her health care policy?
Allegedly she now supports “an array of moderate alternatives” to Medicare For All.
Which is interesting, because she wrote the book on Medicare For All.
The post is still up!
And then there are the areas where the public might be interested to know about her failures and deceptions. One clear one is her role covering up Biden’s cognitive decline.
After the debate, when the world could see Biden’s clear state, she was there to combat your lyin’ eyes.
She’s frequently made a point of hyping her own efforts at “defending democracy.”
Yet she was seized the Dem presidential nomination without receiving a single primary vote.
Her numbers for the non-Democratic roll call vote among party insiders would make Hugo Chavez blush.
And her supposed commitment to democracy makes her consistent attacks on one of the three branches of it—the Supreme Court—curious at best.
That includes plans to pack it, which she’s on the record saying she’s open to.
I wrote more about this point on The Commons at @AmerCompass if you’re interested in my full take on Harris and Democrats contra democracy. americancompass.org/democrats-disd…
And she was a longtime advocate of “Russian collusion,” the effort to tar Trump as a Russian Manchurian candidate to get him out of office.
Lying to overturn an election doesn’t sound particularly democracy-defending, either.
And she’s bought in on plenty of other conspiracy theories—what I believe are now termed “misinformation”—too, from the alleged “Russian bounties” on U.S. soldiers to Trump supposedly tear gassing protestors (he didn’t) to the “whipping” story.
It’s all particularly rich coming from Harris, who was just revealed to be producing her own misinformation on a massive scale by stealth-editing headlines from stories about her for her ads.
@amuse with the details.
But my all-time favorite is her defense of Jussie Smollett.
Just take it in.
The media has been claiming that Harris has pivoted despite the fact she hasn’t given a public appearance in three weeks since taking the top spot.
As @BlueBoxDave explains, that’s decidedly irresponsible.
Is the media interested in this? No, apparently not.
Instead they’re talking about what they deem the most important element of the election: joy.
Give me a break.
As ever, there’s more to this story than I could fit in a thread. Full piece at my newsletter, @Holden_Court: open.substack.com/pub/drewholden…
@Holden_Court And if you want to support my reporting, sign up as a paid subscriber to the newsletter (link in bio) or feel free to kick me a couple bucks in the beer fund.
I know it’s difficult to keep track of all of Tim Walz’s “stolen valor,” exaggerations & false claims about his time in the military.
I tried to compile as many as I could, as well as a few egregious cases of the media spinning for him.
Buckle in, there’s a lot. ⤵️
First, the false claims. To avoid a sort of journalistic stolen valor, I want to be clear: others did this work.
I’ll try to source as well as I can, starting with the latest Walz whopper: saying he took part in the Afghanistan surge in a 2010 debate.
From @NoVA_Campaigns:
There’s been a lot of good reporting. Perhaps none better than from @ChuckRossDC of the Free Beacon.
His first is on that Afghanistan claim, citing Walz’s repeated description of himself as a veteran of “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the gov’t name of the fight in Afghanistan.
Biden’s disastrous debate performance brought to a screeching halt a multi-year campaign from the media to present the president as mentally fit.
Do you really remember how hard the press pushed you not to trust your lyin’ eyes on Biden’s decline?
Start here ⤵️
I suspect most of you remember the allegations from the White House that videos showing Biden behaving erratically were “cheap fakes.”
The media rushed to repeat this claim. Look at the extent @nytimes went to say you didn’t see anything and that Biden was fine.
Perhaps the wildest was @washingtonpost, who gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to videos showing Biden displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as fakes, “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype.”
Part of their defense was that Biden “doesn’t dance.”
You remember Russian Collusion. But do you remember the “Russian bounties” allegation, where the press ran with a conspiracy theory to make Trump look like a monster?
With the debate tonight, I think it’s timely to revisit a falsehood Biden pushed. Follow along ⤵️
It started with a scoop from @nytimes that claimed Russia had placed bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, that Trump knew about it, and he did nothing.
Days later, @washingtonpost followed up with the claim that these bounties—again, allegedly ignored by Trump—led to the deaths of American servicemen.
Do you *really* remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? I fear we’ve lost the plot.
With Hunter’s name in the news I wanted to revisit the extent to which the media went to cover up corruption allegations against—and at the behest of—his father.
Follow along. ⤵️
You have to start with the scoop from @nypost and @EmmaJoNYC.
Their lede from October was damning:
“Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The story was fundamentally about Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. It was huge news, on the eve of an election.
The press leapt to claim the scoop wasn’t legit. And they reframed the issue: now it was about Hunter, not Joe. Here’s @NPR before/after
Good to see the NYT’s considerable resources being put to finding the truth in a debate between private citizens that led one of them to raise a flag upside down.
Real afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted stuff here.
It has only become “news” because of the pivot to left wing clickbait that Trump inspired among the press.
It’s politically inspired harassment and not only is it noxious it’s driving a deep animus among its target demo that is fraying what remains of the bounds of our body politic and society more broadly.