It’s all Kamala, all the time in this edition of the 5QT, or at least mostly it is.
Hey, what do you expect? This woman is a blizzard of skullduggery, tomfoolery, and civilizational decline. One needs to clone oneself just to keep up with all of it.
And first, there’s this:
1. “I Was on Fries”
It appears as though Kamala Harris lies so often and about so many things that she’s even claiming to have worked at McDonald’s when she didn’t. The Washington Free Beacon reported:
On Monday, the New York Times reported without attribution that Harris, who was born in Oakland, Calif., and moved to Montreal with her mother and younger sister when she was 12, “return[ed] to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.” Harris was attending college at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
If some details of the job have varied, while others are murky, that might be because there is no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before that labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019.
The job goes unmentioned in both of her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019.
The Truths We Hold, published ahead of her maiden presidential bid, does include a passage on the “many jobs” she held in college, with no reference to McDonald’s. It also devotes a chapter to the struggles of the working class and assails the service industry’s “starvation wages.” Harris’s McDonald’s job is similarly absent from her 2009 book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.
Two biographies written about Harris make no mention of the job, either. A 2021 memoir by Stacey Johnson-Batiste, Harris’s lifelong friend who grew up with her in California, does not mention McDonald’s anywhere in the text. Dan Morain, who authored Kamala’s Way: An American Life, told the Free Beacon he was “not aware” of her job at McDonald’s.
During Harris’s nomination speech at the Democratic National Committee earlier this month, which was framed by multiple news outlets as a “reintroduction,” she made no reference to McDonald’s. At a rally in Milwaukee that same week, Harris omitted any mention of the Golden Arches as well.
The Free Beacon also obtained a copy of Harris’s October 1987 job application for a law clerk position in the Alameda County district attorney’s office. On that form, Harris, who was in law school at the time, listed several jobs—including a month-long clerical job at a stock brokerage—in a section that asked her to list every position she held in the last 10 years. McDonald’s is absent.
It raises the question: if you’re going to lie about a job, why not at least make it original? Say you ran numbers for the mob, or tell people you raced go-karts professionally.
Or that you were a professional sword-swallower at the circus.
Something. But lying about working at McDonald’s? Really?
2. How to Handle the Kamala Flip-Flops
They’re accumulating, of course. First there was the adoption of Trump’s “no tax on tips” pledge, and then there was the repudiation of her position on banning hydraulic fracturing. And, of course, the new interest in building a border wall.
JD Vance is on the stump ripping Kamala Harris for stealing Trump’s policy positions, and, of course, to raise the issue of the theft is entirely legitimate.
But Ace of Spades says Vance is going about this wrong, and he’s got a good point:
This is the wrong line of attack. Completely, utterly wrong.
If you say she’s stealing Trump’s policies, that mean she is going to implement the policies people want. Which is much more important to them than squabbling about who gets credit.
Trump did the same thing with DeSantis. I mean, 1, I don’t know if “enforce the border” is exactly a new policy position, and 2, what does it matter who originated a policy if it’s a good idea? Do we shy away from borrowing Reagan’s ideas of low tax/low regulation and peace through strength because he thought of them (or, at least, was the first major adopter)?
The real attack should be that Kamala Harris is lying. She knows her actual policies are unpopular, so she’s lying about them so she can get elected and impose them on an unwilling population.
She’s not stealing the policy. She’s lying about the policy. She has absolutely no intention of implementing “Trump’s policies.”
And if you tell people that she’s going to implement Trump’s very popular, common-sense policies– they’ll say, “Well good! We get Trump’s policies without Trump’s baggage.”
Is squbbling about “credit” more important than that?
Ace says the answer is to demand that Harris explain why, if these are her policies, she isn’t acting to make them a reality now, in the administration that she’s part of.
What I’d add to that is the proof of the lie. For example, the “no tax on tips” flip-flop is awfully hard to justify seeing as though she’s the No. 2 in an administration that is hiring 80,000-odd IRS agents whose jobs entail chasing people down for taxes on their tips. What happens to those new IRS agents, Kamala? Are they just going to hang around the office and eat crullers all day? Because you certainly won’t be laying them off.
The point being, as Ace noted, that she’s obviously, provably lying. So you acknowledge that yes, these are good policies, and yes, it would be nice if there truly was bipartisan agreement on getting them done, but no, Kamala isn’t for them, she actively works against them, and she hates the American people so much that she would tell bald-faced lies about her policy positions just to get elected and have power over her fellow man.
3. No, There Will Not Be Any Live, Unscripted, One-On-One Interviews
I’ve been doing a bunch of media interviews this week promoting King of the Jungle (more on that below), and one of the topics that have come up as we talk about the state of affairs is the ongoing refusal by the Harris campaign to put her forth to answer questions like I’ve been doing.
Yeah, sure, there’s that Dana Bash infomercial on CNN, on which Harris had to have Tim Walz there to babysit her, and it went up on TV Thursday night. It’s still not the same thing as sitting down live, unscripted, by yourself, and just talking.
Team Harris has done something very peculiar with the mounting scrutiny over this basement campaign. They’ve sent their talking heads out to defend the media blackout, and more than one of them that I’ve seen have said something like “because we want to win” as the excuse for not making her available.
Look, if you’re running somebody for state rep or city council, it’s axiomatic that you’d put them out for as many interviews and media appearances as you can so that you can show off the candidate and get the message out.
And they’re telling you that their candidate for president isn’t capable of fulfilling that requirement.
It’s, as the old saying goes, shocking but not surprising.
And it’s clearly true. Did you see the mess Harris made of a simple speech to a high school band on Wednesday?
Kamala explains the concept of how teams work together to a high school band as if they are 5 years old.
It's a real mystery why her handlers never let her speak without a script…pic.twitter.com/iS2p4gtTJx
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 28, 2024
“But our country is counting on you. All of you. You are leaders by the very fact that you all are in this room, doing what you do at this incredible school, doing it as one big team, understanding all of the different parts that fit together to create a team.”
Every time this woman offers up one of these word slaws, which in her head are brilliant observations on life but are utterly disqualifying to almost anyone serious about their own vote, I keep going back to that famous Jack Nicholson line in As Good As It Gets: “Sell crazy someplace else. We’re all stocked up here.”
4. The Unrealized Gains Tax Disaster
Bharat Ramamurti is a former National Economic Council deputy director in the Biden administration, and he’s an economic adviser to the Harris campaign on an “informal” basis. Team Harris sent Ramamurti out to defend her crazy tax plan, which would jack capital gains taxes to 44 percent and drop a 25 percent tax on “unrealized” gains — meaning that if the government thinks assets you own have appreciated in value, they can demand that you cut them a check for a quarter of that appreciation, whether you’ve cashed in that asset or not.
Here’s how that went on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Wednesday:
This is unsellable, and it doesn’t particularly help the case to say it only applies to people with more than $100 million to their name.
Breaking those people financially does exactly what good, again?
The guy with $100 million worth of assets almost assuredly employs a bunch of people. You’re going to make him cash-poor by telling him that you want a quarter of his asset gains on the stuff he isn’t selling, based on the government’s almost assuredly corrupt valuations, and he’s going to dump every expense he can in order to satisfy that.
And if he has to unload assets to pay for the tax on his unrealized gains, now he’s on the hook for a 44 percent capital gains tax.
You get him going and coming.
Not to mention that what you’re doing now is making those assets he sells into liabilities for anybody who would buy them.
The answer would then be that if you own a business, the last thing you want to do is grow it. If you own land, you won’t want to develop it. Any large-scale economic investment would be punished badly enough that nobody would invest their money here.
Ramamurti either knows this and he’s on TV spinning it the best way he can, which essentially makes him a charlatan — he’s trying to get a job in a Harris administration — or he’s an utter economic illiterate communist.
Either way, this is highly, highly untenable. It needs to be hung around Harris’ neck like an albatross, because if she were to win this election and somehow implement this plan, we would have the worst economic crash since 1929 and turn into Venezuela del Norte. Capital would fly out of here so quickly it would make your head spin. The question is where it would go, given the leftward turn of all the usual places.
Argentina, perhaps.
5. Yes, the Sequel to King of the Jungle Is Coming
I mentioned my latest novel above, so allow me to expand a little about the book-writing efforts.
My initial plan, following publication of King of the Jungle in April, was that I would write another political book: this one a sequel to The Revivalist Manifesto, which is still very much available and in fact might be as valuable as ever as a framing of American politics. It’s held up pretty well since it was written in 2022.
But in starting to write The Revivalist Agenda, which I’d initially planned to have out later this month, I found myself being tossed to and fro by all of the massive, historic events that have rocked American politics this year — Joe Biden’s political collapse, the bizarre insanity of the Harris campaign, the Trump assassination attempt, the wars overseas, and a lot more — and I started realizing that it’s impossible to write a big-picture political book right now without having any way to be sure that the assumptions behind it are remotely correct.
The purpose of The Revivalist Agenda is to talk about what a revivalist movement in charge of American politics (by revivalism, think “conservatism on offense,” or perhaps a broader-based and longer-lasting MAGA movement) would look like in action. And the outline I’ve got for it is solid. But how that book is written, and how its arguments are constructed and framed, is completely different if Trump wins in November than if he loses. The former is a preview of a second Trump administration and an argument for going further than even Team Trump is considering. The latter is a game plan for red states to impose a brand-new federalism on a ruinous, out-of-control, and destructive federal government in order to save what parts of America that can be saved.
And I found myself in a situation where I couldn’t write both versions at the same time, nor could I justify the effort in writing The Revivalist Agenda under either electoral result, which gives me a 50-50 chance of looking like an idiot if I predicted November wrong.
So I’m punting The Revivalist Agenda. I’ll finish it after the election and hopefully have it out in time for Inauguration Day next year.
Meantime, I’m off and running by writing From Hellmarsh With Love, which is a quirky title for a King of the Jungle sequel. American Spectator subscribers will get the same access to the new book that you had with KOTJ, which is to say we’ll serialize it in these pages beginning next weekend, and there will be installments of two or three chapters for the next couple of months. Then, I’ll publish it on Amazon when that’s done.
What’s the book about? Well, if you read King of the Jungle, you’ll know that it ends in romance, and that’s where the new novel begins. There’s a wedding and a honeymoon, and then there’s tyranny, prison, and a lot of action and adventure.
How’s that for a tease?
In advance of the new book coming out, I’ll just encourage you to catch up on the first novel. Pick it up here, or read the serialized version here.
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