Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris‘ campaign was slammed online Thursday afternoon after one of its spokespeople tried to claim that the campaign had not agreed to the ABC News debate rules that the candidates’ microphones would be muted during the debate while their opponent talked.

The claim from Harris spokesman Brian Fallon came hours after the New York Post reported that ABC News informed both the Harris campaign and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign in an email from ABC News Chief Counsel Eric Lieberman that the September 10 debate would have the same rules as the CNN debate in June — the candidates will be standing with muted microphones, not allowed to have any notes with them, and no audience will be present.

CNN reported that the Harris campaign was asked to let go of the issue surrounding the microphones so that the debate can happen, but that the campaign appeared to not be doing so, even though ABC News already set the “formal list of debate rules.”

“Our latest understanding is that even though Trump said Monday he would be fine with an unmuted mic, his handlers don’t trust him to spar live with VP Harris and are asking ABC to ignore Trump’s comments and keep the mics muted or else they will back out of the debate for a third time,” Fallon claimed. “We have been asked to accede to Trump’s handlers’ wishes on this point for the sake of preserving the debate. We find the Trump’s team’s stance to be weak, and remain in discussions with ABC on the final rules.”

Fallon faced significant backlash online over his claim from a wide range of political pundits.

“Here’s the thing about shills: They are literally paid to be dishonest and disingenuous,” said John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary Magazine. “Though in Brian’s case, I’m sure he’d do it for free, since he hasn’t made an honest argument in his entire life.”

Tickets for “Am I Racist?” are on sale NOW! Buy here for a theater near you.

Versus Media Podcast host Stephen L. Miller wrote on X: “Biden made these rules and ABC is abiding by the original debate rules, just as you originally wanted. Don’t know what else to tell you.”

Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro fired back at Fallon: “Stop trying to manufacture excuses to avoid debates.”

“He agreed to three,” Shapiro said. “You agreed to one with the original rules, and one provisionally; then you tried to change the original rules. You’re a campaign of cowardice.”

Stop trying to manufacture excuses to avoid debates. He agreed to three. You agreed to one with the original rules, and one provisionally; then you tried to change the original rules. You’re a campaign of cowardice. https://t.co/Khuhod6evt

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 29, 2024

Red State writer Bonchie added: “No one is buying this. Especially not after ABC News’ own memo on the rules leaked showing the rules *were always* the same as the CNN rules. You got caught trying to manufacture a reason to pull out. Own it.”

The entire Kamala Harris campaign relies on you knowing nothing about Kamala Harris.

First rule of Kamala Harris Fight Club: Nobody talks about Kamala Harris. You must never mention her positions. You must never mention what her crap administration has done. You must never mention anything of the sort. And you must certainly never attempt to get to the underlying philosophy that motivates her politics. You must never ever attempt to do that.

That’s because if you dig just a tiny bit, you find that the Democratic Party has gone so radically far to the Left that they are now indistinguishable from the Democratic Socialists of America. That is the reality.

Look at the great “intellectual luminaries” of the Democratic Party. I’m not talking about the politicians; I’m talking about the thought leaders.

Among those thought leaders is Nikole Hannah-Jones. You may not have heard about Hannah-Jones recently because, after all, she hasn’t done any actual work for the last five years. She wrote the absolutely fictitious “The 1619 Project” and in 2020 was given a Pulitzer for it. It is trash. The entire 1619 Project is rooted in the idea that every element of American life is built on the foundation of slavery, and thus morally corrupt and evil and must be wiped away.

The 1619 Project falsifies history, as professional historians have pointed out. But this supposed genius was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. She is the apotheosis of a “Democratic intellectual.” She gave a speech recently in which she said, “You know what COVID taught me? That we have enough for everybody. Overnight, we printed $6 trillion. We had universal health care. We had universal basic income. COVID proved it’s possible.”

If that sounds like communism to you, that’s because it is communism. You may recall that COVID ended with a 40-year high in inflation, a massively spiraling debt problem, and the complete shutdown of the American economy.

You might remember because you were there. But according to Hannah-Jones, that was amazing. That is what America ought to look like. It ought to look like the government paying you to stay home, shutting down your business, and then compensating you for shutting down your business. The government ought to provide everything for free, and it will have no impact.

In June, Hannah-Jones said:

Y’all remember this thing called a pandemic? Y’all remember that? Do you remember how when all of a sudden all of America was experiencing what black people experience regularly, high unemployment rates, housing instability, inability to access health care, we printed 3 to $6 trillion overnight, overnight. And all of a sudden you couldn’t evict people. We had universal housing. Anybody who wanted to go get their shot didn’t have to show a lick of paper or a dollar. Nothing. You showed up, You got the shot.

We paid people income, universal income. My cousin Shamir, who’s in the 1619 documentary in the capitalism episode, started working at 15 years old. The most she ever made was when she got laid off for COVID and got a check from the government to stay at home. The most she ever made. And she cried about it because she was like, “I have been able to save $1,000 for the first time in my life only because all these people are dying out here. That’s the first time America cared about me.” 

The proposal is free money.

The reason the government compensated people during COVID is because the government told them they could not work. The government said you cannot go to school. You cannot go into your place of work. You have to shut down your business. They shut down the entire country, and then they had to do something so people could remain living.

They took away your livelihood, which is not the same thing as a high unemployment rate that results from high levels of high school dropouts, single motherhood, or dysfunction in the home, community, or schools.

It’s not the same, but this is the actual ideal Democrats are shooting for. They won’t say it out loud because if they ever did, people would recognize how ugly it is. The big problem for the Democrats with Hannah-Jones is that she’s constantly saying the Democratic ideal out loud.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

The reality is that the Biden-Harris administration has tried a lot of this.

Blowing money into the economy, the modern monetary theory that debt doesn’t matter, that doing so creates a rising tide lifting all boats doesn’t work.

It’s amoral. Money doesn’t grow on trees. It’s not magically popping out of the ground because the Federal Reserve says it is. Money is merely a mechanism of exchange. Money does not have its own inherent value any more than inches have their own inherent value on a ruler. It is a measure and a way of quantifying exchange. That is all money is. That’s all it’s ever been.

But for the Democrats, the Democratic Party, and Harris, the basic idea is the government can magically make money and then just give it out, and that’s what makes the economy go. That is the basic theory of leftism when it comes to economics. It’s the basic Keynesian theory as to how economics should work.

But the actual result is people feel left behind — because it doesn’t actually work that way.

We are now spending more money year on year than any country in the history of the planet. Yet fewer Americans feel they can achieve what the government has been promising them: the home, the family, the retirement.

That’s not a spending problem. That is something else. It is a perversion of all the incentives leading people to make the right decisions that allow them to build a home and a family and a retirement. Only 10% of Americans believe home ownership is easy or somewhat easy to achieve.

Guess whose fault that might be.

How about the Biden-Harris administration, which has created the most unaffordable housing market in history? Look at all the restrictions the Democrats have put on building all across the country. Look at how they have inflated the currency, which means an increase in the interest rates, which means higher mortgage rates. Then, nobody wants to sell their homes to end up with a higher mortgage.

Tickets for “Am I Racist?” are on sale NOW! Buy here for a theater near you.

In 2005, George W. Bush suggested privatizing Social Security and Democrats went nuts. In January 2005, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was 10,603. Bush was pointing out Social Security is a pyramid scheme. If we had taken the money, put it in an index fund, and left it there until now, trillions of dollars would have flowed into Social Security because today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is 41,000.

Instead, the federal government was left in charge of the program, so they could raid it whenever necessary.

That is Democratic policy making: You cannot bring the private markets to bear on anything.

Democrats have said everyone needs to go to college, and we need to pour money into student loans. And the cost of college has shot up and the worth of a degree has dropped precipitously.

Harris is proposing $5 trillion in tax increases, including a 28% federal corporate tax rate and a 44.6% top capital gains and dividend tax rate, which would give America the highest total tax rate on corporate income in the developed world.

Democrat policies fail.

And Harris, the most leftist major party presidential candidate in American history, has not been forced to answer for any of them.

* * *

WATCH THE TRAILER FOR ‘AM I RACIST?’ — A MATT WALSH COMEDY ON DEI