Here are a few things about the presidential campaigns you might have not seen from your usual sources concerning name calling, JD Vance, Bitcoin, and the wannabe Silvershirts of the Heritage Foundation.
Lost in all the brouhaha about the candidates for president in recent days is the undeniable fact that this year’s election will be decided on voters’ perception of character.
As someone who has and will continue to invest in explaining Project 2025, the far right’s blueprint for governance, I’ve come to realize the biggest difference in what Democrats are doing now.
There’s a war of words going on; it’s high caliber name calling. And, for once, the Dems are winning. Such fun! I realize the vapidity of playing such a game intellectually; the candidate should be pounding her opponent on the 900+ pages the Heritage Foundation has coughed up as a vision.
To be sure, the candidate herself, along with the potential picks for VP, are cataloging the issues to be acted upon during the next administration. And the people impacted by those issues do hear the call-outs.
A parent with young children will be motivated by hearing about Head Start being phased out; they’ll also understand the danger of the promise to defund schools with vaccine mandates. Young women are moved when reproductive health is highlighted in stump speeches. Boomers have every right to be worried about the erosion of Social Security and Medicare.
But what I see cutting through the noise are the character references being the leadoff in Kamala Harris’ campaigning. They are holding up a mirror on their opponent, mimicking Trump’s tendency to favor emotional appeals over facts. It’s TikTok campaigning in a process that purports to honor substance and oratory.
In her very first speech as a presidential candidate, Harris told the crowd at her campaign headquarters that as a prosecutor, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.” She then added to big cheers, “So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Every squeak out of the Trump campaign is being responded to with descriptions designed to malign the image of their candidate.
“Statement on a 78-Year-Old Criminal’s Fox News Appearance,” the press release was titled. “After watching Fox News this morning we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok?”
[Trump] Praised dictators because he wants to be one; Trump is clearly worried he made the wrong pick in JD Vance; Trump is old and quite weird? This guy shouldn’t be president ever again.
After a Trump speech at an event hosted by Turning Point USA, the campaign quickly responded with a searing press release that began with the headline, “Statement on Trump’s Promise to End Democracy.”
The release continued with lines like, “Our democracy is under assault by criminal Donald Trump: After the last election Trump lost, he sent a mob to overturn the results. This campaign, he has promised violence if he loses, the end of our elections if he wins.”
Harris spokesperson James Singer described the former president as sounding like “someone you wouldn’t want to sit next to at a restaurant.”
When Trump claimed at a rally in Minnesota that he could only lose the state if there was election fraud.(A Fox news poll has him down 6 points the Harris campaign released a statement that read, “Tonight in Minnesota, a bitter, unhinged, 78-year-old convicted felon kept clinging to his lies about the 2020 election he lost being ‘rigged,’ rambled about his former opponent and golfing, and made excuses for why he’s afraid to debate Vice President Harris.”
‘Trump is old and quite weird’. Yada, Yada.
The Republican Vice Presidential candidate is doing such a good job for Democrats’ that press release headlines like “JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide)” almost seem gratuitous.
His past is haunting him, including a Tucker Carlson interview where he spouted off about the United States being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He then specifically mentioned Harris, Buttigieg and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as examples.
Here’s another cat lady…
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Candidate Donald Trump was on the road this past weekend trying hard to paint Kamala Harris as a not-good person, who is somehow less than human. He dug deep into his bag of insults, calling her “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history”.
He referred to her as “evil,” mocked her laugh, the pronunciation of her name, and said that “the American dream is dead” if Harris wins in November.
On Truth Social, We’re not ready for a Marxist President,” “and Lyin’ Kamala Harris is a RADICAL LEFT MARXIST, AND WORSE!”
So far, his insults, besides being untrue, have failed to motivate his rally audiences, if the video I viewed from his Minnesota rally is any measure.
Outside of Trump’s base, there does not appear to be much movement in support of his candidacy, with one very important exception: bitter bitcoin billionaires. In 2019, the GOP candidate claimed those currencies were “based on thin air.”
This year, he went to Nashville, Tennessee for a national Bitcoin conference, hoping to win backing with the classic combination of fear, bravado, and prosperity promises.
“if they win this election, every one of you will be gone. They will be vicious, they will be ruthless. They will do things that you wouldn't believe. But right now, because of me, they're leaving you alone. So please say thank you.”
In his keynote address at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, the Republican presidential nominee promised to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet” and create a bitcoin “strategic reserve” using the currency that the government currently holds.
He also promised to remove Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler if elected and implement a crypto advisory council, teasing the crowd by asking attendees if anyone wanted to join.
“We will have regulations, but from now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” he said.
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This shift to wooing cryptocurrency didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. In some ways, a crypto future is as scary as what the Heritage Foundation promises– and they dovetail nicely.
Both come out of a fraternity (or cult) of the privileged seeking validation of their philosophies concerning the primacy of the individual over the collective functions of society. This, in various forms, has been a tenet of right wing ideologies that over the past fifty years have come to be tolerated in mainstream politics in Western Democracies.
Dave Troy, an investigative journalist with a technology background, wrote a history of this school of thought for the Washington Spectator in 2022:
The attack on government control over the dollar and the idea that money, like gold, should be private and out of the hands of government officials is fundamentally a fascist idea, more aligned with the vision of Mussolini than of Roosevelt. The gold standard has always been brittle and required departures when crisis finally came; likewise, cryptocurrencies, which are expensive, difficult to use, environmentally hazardous, and lacking in legal frameworks for dealing with errors or crime, are ill suited to the complex, highly evolved world of modern banking. It is neither practical nor reasonable to expect the entire world to shift to “hard money” banking, not least because so many would be harmed in the process and others, who had done little besides get in on the Ponzi scheme early, would be unfairly enriched.
The war over currency is but one front—along with traditionalism, nationalism, and energy—on the spectrum of current global conflicts. “You have to control three things: borders, currency, and military and national identity,” Steve Bannon said in 2017, speaking of his goals for the traditionalist fascist international. The increasing confluence of anti-Fed zeal with private intelligence collection presents an unprecedented risk of capture for democracies.
Bitcoin and the like are valued in part because of their freedom from national treasuries; the individual owning those currencies believes the cryptographic function in the blockchain of transactions is an effective protection for their interests. The problem with this intellectually inbred sense of security comes from all the externalities involved in transactions and storage of this worth.
Billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies are stolen (or lost) every year, not because their code was hacked, but because some entity or individual was able to intervene in the processes necessary to conduct transactions.
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Finally, riffing off the above mention in the Washington Spectator excerpt of “private intelligence services,” I wish to call attention to a suspicious tidbit from the Oversight Project of the Heritage Foundation. Ostensibly this group exists to serve as a watchdog on governmental functioning, something every non-profit in DC smart enough to file a Freedom of Information Request should do.
But the Oversight Project is doing more than collecting, analyzing, and distributing information.
Esquire columnist Charles P Pierce:
It has long been plain that the folks at the Heritage Foundation want their Project 2025 agenda and will do pretty much anything, fair and foul, to enact it. They, and their various intellectual chop shops, are the American franchise of a worldwide movement to create corporate autocracy and political authoritarianism that has taken different forms all over the world and is only now facing political pushback in places like France and the United Kingdom. But this seems extreme even for the claque of budding Silvershirts.
The Oversight Project is Heritage’s legal ratf*cking operation. Now, it seems, it has turned its attention to developing “data” indicating that Thomas Crooks did not act alone in his attempt to assassinate the former president.
Oversight took to social media on July 17 to claim they had tracked Trump shooter Thomas Cooks’ movements for an entire year prior to the assassination attempt.
Via Huffington Post:
“We found the assassin’s connections through our in-depth analysis of mobile ad data to track movements of Crooks and his associates,” the Oversight Project wrote on social media on Monday, explaining that it had identified nine “devices that were located at Crook’s home and his work within the past year.”
The organization suggested that Crooks may have had some connection to the FBI before the shooting, writing: “Someone who regularly visited Crooks home and work also visited a building in Washington, DC located in Gallery Place. This is in the same vicinity of an @FBI office on June 26, 2023. Who’s device is this?”
The post was catnip for MAGA conspiracy theorists who believe the “deep state” — entrenched bureaucrats in federal agencies and law enforcement — has been trying to sabotage, arrest and now kill Trump.
This sort of data collection would be cross referenced in some manner (evidence?) if the group actually meant to do something besides stir the fire.
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The spring, the Oversight Project ran academic exercises (The Transition Integrity Report) “to educate the public regarding crises that may arise in relation to the upcoming presidential election in the United States.”
It’s clear from reading this report that the intention was to establish a foundation (legally and propaganda-wise) for challenging the 2024 Presidential election results on behalf of groups ideologically aligned with Donald Trump.
The background section of this report starts with:
TIP 2024 was conceived in January in response to the Biden Administration’s weaponization of government against their domestic opposition and the President’s record of violating norms and constitutional limitations on executive power.
All TIP’s scenarios ended with Donald Trump winning the vote in November. All assumed massive left wing violence in the aftermath of the elections; that leftist forces had compromised security agencies; big tech would actively seek to give Democrats an advantage; and that China would interfere in the election in some way.
The scenarios “suggest that President Biden and his allies—with assistance from a weaponized governmental bureaucracy and loyal proxies in corporate media—are well-equipped to undermine electoral procedures or to challenge results that run counter to their interests.”
Notably, the TIP report doesn’t suggest any violence or voter fraud coming from right wing sources. Other than some lawfare type suggestions, there is no plan offered other than perhaps private individuals calling for protests in support of Trump.
Of course, now that President Biden has withdrawn from the electoral contest, there might be scenarios where Trump doesn’t win, something inconceivable in these exercises.
Last month on the far-right channel Real America’s Voice, Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts he was ready to take up arms in the fight against the “radical left.”
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”