Beneath the coordinated, manufactured hype campaign promoting Kamala Harris, it’s not hard to detect an air of desperation. We’re constantly being told that Harris is a transformative candidate who will save democracy as we know it, but she’s dodged pretty much every opportunity to answer serious questions since stealing the nomination.
The whole thing violates a basic rule of persuasion, which is that you’re supposed to show, not tell. Everything’s more convincing when you see it, instead of hearing about it. But Harris isn’t capable of making the case for her own candidacy. The best she can do is cackle and repeat her stump speech. So it falls on professional commentators to articulate why it makes sense to vote for her.
The problem that these commentators have is that, if they go into any kind of detail about the policies Harris has said she supports, then she will lose the election. Abolishing ICE, guaranteeing everyone a federal job, outlawing private health insurance, banning fracking — these are all proposals that make it basically impossible to win a national race. That’s why she has backpedaled on every single one of these proposals. She has no real values. Everything’s malleable at a moment’s notice. So how exactly do you pitch a candidate like that?
The other day in The New York Times, columnist David French came up with a solution. He wrote a piece entitled, “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris.” And it’s worth talking about this in some detail, because it’s going to be a familiar refrain from the Left in the next three months. The idea is that electing Kamala Harris will end Donald Trump’s political career and allow the Republican Party in four years to get back to what French calls “Reaganite conservatism.”
In other words, don’t worry about what Harris believes or doesn’t believe. Vote strategically to take down Donald Trump so that in four years, the party of Ronald Reagan will return.
This is an argument that’s tailor-made to appeal to conservatives with some memory of Reagan, and a very poor understanding of Kamala Harris. But everyone else understands the problem with it: Saving conservatism by voting for Kamala Harris is like saving someone from drowning by chaining a millstone around their neck. A Kamala Harris administration would guarantee that the future of American conservatism would look a lot like “conservatism” in Canada or the UK. We’re already trending in that direction. An administration that censors dissent, criminalizes firearm ownership, and stops enforcing the law would complete our transformation into a one-party, Left-liberal government.
People like David French want that transformation to happen as quickly as possible. And French hopes to convince conservatives to buy into this change by arguing that their preferred political ideology has already been replaced by the so-called MAGA movement.
Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as ‘traitors.’ What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?
The issue here is pretty simple: French’s assumption is wrong. Trump has not “fundamentally changed” conservatism. Many of his positions (immigration in particular) are more conservative than the average Republican politician, especially the average Republican politician before Trump came onto the scene. Even where he has moderated — on abortion and gay marriage for example — he’s not any more moderate than the average Republican politician. I wish he was less moderate, but it’s absurd to suggest that some establishment Republican like Tim Scott or whoever would have held the line better on those issues.
French seems to realize this because he immediately moves on to talking about how Donald Trump supposedly lies a lot. He drops the topic of ideology and starts making familiar observations about Trump’s character.
Let’s take an assertion that should be uncontroversial, especially to a party that often envisions itself as a home for people of faith: Lying is wrong. I’m not naïve; I know that politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since Athens. But I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump. Even worse, Trump’s lies are contagious. The legal results speak for themselves. A cascade of successful defamation lawsuits demonstrate the severity and pervasiveness of Republican dishonesty.
What’s not mentioned here is the fact that Harris spent several years lying about Joe Biden’s mental capacity, or the fact that Tim Walz spent 20 years lying about his service in the National Guard. These are actual falsehoods. They’re statements of face that can be proven false.
What French is accusing Trump of doing is very different. He’s saying that Trump was lying by claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged.” But this isn’t a claim that anyone has proven false, or that anyone can prove false. It’s Trump’s assessment of what happened to him, and it happens to be a very well-founded assessment. The entire system of elections in this country was changed in a matter of weeks, removing all kinds of safeguards against fraud — ultimately allowing Joe Biden to receive millions more votes than Barack Obama. That followed years of deliberate falsehoods about Russian collusion that never took place, along with lies about “very fine people” in Charlottesville and the Hunter Biden laptop and so on. These falsehoods were repeated many times by the Biden-Harris administration. Add then of course there are the millions of illegal aliens who have been shipped into this country over the past few decades. Any reasonable person can conclude that this amounts to an unfair or “rigged” political process.
But David French doesn’t care about those lies. He only cares about Trump’s response to them. So he continues:
Let’s take another assertion that should be relatively uncontroversial: Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. Only one party has nominated a man who was indicted for his role in the criminal scheme to steal an American election, a scheme that culminated in a violent political riot.
French then hand-waves away the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month, as well as the attempted assassinations of Brett Kavanaugh and Steve Scalise. All of those instances of political violence, according to David French, pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s decision to challenge the results of the 2020 election. That decision, French says, led to a “violent” riot in which only Trump supporters were killed. Therefore, Trump is responsible for inciting political violence.
I’m not going to recount all of Trump’s statements on January 6 calling for peaceful protest. Those are well-documented. And it’s also well-documented that the Left likes to pretend that Trump never made those calls for peaceful protest, which is why the Supreme Court faulted Jack Smith’s indictment for failing to mention them.
What’s remarkable about French’s assertion is that, even if it were true, then he could make a very similar complaint against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’ve already talked about Tim Walz’s role in delaying the National Guard response to the riots in Minneapolis. But it’s actually worse than that. A Minnesota police sergeant testified that Walz ordered the authorities to surrender the police station to the mob. Watch:
"I heard the Governor say 'Give it up'"
-Minneapolis Police Sergeant Anna Hedberg
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz gave orders to allow the Third Precinct to burn, abandoning Minnesota families and police in favor of BLM rioters. pic.twitter.com/X1NYjKA40p
— Clarity (@covid_clarity) August 12, 2024
So the governor of Minnesota whips up a mob of violent thugs. They ransack businesses. They set buildings on fire. They kill people and cause tens of millions of dollars in property damage. And then, in response, the governor tells the authorities to stand down so there can be more carnage. Meanwhile his wife lowers the window to take in the aroma of burning tires. And Kamala Harris gets to work bailing out the perpetrators.
It’s easy to talk about violence like this in the abstract. So here’s new footage of what Tim Walz oversaw in Minneapolis. This apparently hasn’t been widely broadcast until yesterday, when it resurfaced on social media. Watch:
A startling new video that has never been seen before by the public from the Minneapolis Riots.
This was filmed on 5/30/2020 at 4:23am in the Phillips Neighborhood according to the video’s metadata.
This is Tim Walz and Kamala Harris’s legacy.pic.twitter.com/YMqP042Cpm
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) August 12, 2024
It looks like a war zone. Any competent governor who cared about his city would have done everything in his power to end this destruction. But Tim Walz enabled it.
This is why, whatever criticisms you can bring against Donald Trump for January 6, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to protest Donald Trump by voting for a Harris-Walz ticket. These people aren’t just liars — they promoted violence that led to the deaths of innocent people all over the country. They bailed out radicals so they could commit more acts of violence. That kind of violence isn’t suddenly acceptable because it happened outside of the Capitol building.
At best, even if French’s points were all valid (and they aren’t) it would be an argument for not voting for Trump. But actively voting for a far-Left Democrat — and doing it in the name of conservatism — is an asinine position. Despicable, even. Trump may not be pro-life enough for my tastes, but the Biden Administration supports abortion until the moment of birth. They are also actively prosecuting pro-lifers. French, the avid pro-lifer, is voting for the regime that is currently throwing pro-life activists in federal prison.
He’s also backing a government that’s just proposed “ethics rules” and term limits for the Supreme Court, which would obviously be a major step towards ending the independent judiciary in this country. What part of “Reaganite conservatism” involves kicking conservative justices off the bench because they fly historic flags outside their beach houses? What conservative principle is that defending? Using pretexts to oust justices who don’t toe the Left’s party line is not “conservative.” It’s not what Reagan did, either. It’s what Reagan’s enemies did in the Soviet Union.
And for that matter, what exactly is “conservative” about abolishing ICE and closing all illegal immigrant detention centers? Does that conserve our borders or our national heritage? No one can ask Kamala Harris about this because she won’t sit for any hostile interviews. But it’s on tape. Watch:
Open borders Kamala wants to free all criminal illegal immigrants.
Attendee: “I want to know, when you become president, would you be committing to close the immigration detention centers?”
Kamala: “Absolutely, on day one. On day one.” pic.twitter.com/XLfrhyLpns
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 12, 2024
You can’t have a functioning country with someone like this in charge. It’s impossible by definition to maintain our borders when you shut down all border enforcement. And there are many more examples like this. A Harris-Walz administration would mean that more federal resources would be allocated on the basis of race. It would mean vastly more government spending and giveaways to preferred groups, like student loan debt “relief.”
None of these ideas are consistent with Reaganism, but people like David French want you to think they are. And they’re now actively campaigning for a candidate who hates this country and its people and wishes to do harm to both. Now, some perspective is important. I’m not going to claim that this election is the last election we’ll ever have and we have to win or America is over. Both sides say that about every election. I’ve heard it for as long as I’ve been alive. But it is true that a Kamala victory would mean eight years of this current regime. Very likely 12 years. This country has suffered greatly from just four years. Another decade of this would be disastrous.
Every American who considers himself “conservative” or Christian has a moral obligation to vote against Kamala Harris. She is an evil person and part of a regime that wants to kill babies, destroy our national sovereignty, indoctrinate our children into an ideology of self-harm and confusion, and in every other sense actively work against everything we claim to stand for.
Whatever you think of Trump — even if you have the most unflattering view of him that a reasonable person could possible have — he is not a part of that agenda. If you are voting for that agenda, you are actively participating in the evil. You are supporting it. You are helping it to gain power. That you are doing it all to get back at Trump, at the expense of our country, just makes you a fool at best.
This isn’t about being loyal to Donald Trump or any other politician. It’s about loving your country enough — and caring enough about your children and their future — to put your feelings about Donald Trump to the side and casting a vote against this regime that has already done incredible harm to this country. And will do a lot more, if we don’t stop it.
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