Tag Archive for: Tampon Tim Walz

‘A New Way Forward’? Harris Campaign [Finally] Announces 2024 Policies

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

One day ahead of her debate with former President Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris has unveiled a policy agenda that could compel Christian businesses to participate in abortion and LGBT events that violate biblical morality, sign a national abortion expansion bill, pack the Supreme Court, give amnesty to the entire illegal immigrant population of the United States, strip law-abiding U.S. citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process, double-down on inflationary economic policies, continue criminal lawfare against Trump, and promote universal daycare.

Until Monday morning, the “issues” section of Kamala Harris’s campaign website did not exist 49 days after the Democratic Party coronated Harris without a primary. Harris has dubbed her policy plan “A New Way Forward” — the same name President George W. Bush gave to his 2007 surge in Iraq, intended to end terrorism against U.S. soldiers and transform Muslim Iraq into a pluralistic Western democracy.

Equity for the LGBTQ movement, bankruptcy for Christian businesses: The cornerstone of Harris’s LGBTQ policy, which she brands as promoting “civil rights,” would prevent Christian business people from living out their faith in the private sector and economically impoverish believers. After noting she began unlawfully officiating same-sex marriage in 2004 as California attorney general and “refused to defend” a marriage protection amendment democratically passed by California voters, Harris promises “to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.” The so-called Equality Act would add sexual preference and, in some versions, gender identity, to landmark civil rights legislation designed to protect racial minorities and women from discrimination. By raising homosexuality and transgenderism to the same legal status as race and religion, the Equality Act could force Christian doctors to perform gender-reassignment surgeries and require Christian business owners to take part in services that violate their religious beliefs — or go out of business. State and local statutes modeled after this bill have resulted in such lawfare prosecutions as the never-ending legal disputes of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips.

Throughout the issues section, Harris contrasts her policy positions, not with the radically truncated 2024 Republican Party platform which Trump campaign operatives foisted on rank-and-file delegates at the Republican National Committee on July 8, but with “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda.” The Trump campaign publicly opposed the project, which the Heritage Foundation subsequently shut down. Trump replaced GOP’s historic commitment to a Human Life Amendment, and Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) confirmed that Trump will veto any national pro-life protections that cross his desk during the next four years.

The “Project 2025 agenda will eliminate federal rules that protect LGBTQI+ Americans from discrimination,” says the website, referring to laws like the SAFE Act that prevent the predatory transgender industry from targeting minors for puberty blocks, cross-sex hormone injections, and life-altering surgeries.

A national abortion expansion act: The website continues the Harris campaign’s rebranding of abortion as “reproductive freedom,” vowing that, as president, “she will never allow a national abortion ban to become law. And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, she will sign it.” The Biden-Harris administration has endorsed the so-called “Women’s Health Protection” Act (WHPA), which would strike down more than 1,300 state pro-life protections including laws protecting children from late-term abortions (including some after the point of viability), repealing parental consent and notification laws, and repealing conscience protections for pro-life healers.

“If elected, Trump will ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF,” it claims, although no law nor proposal would curtail IVF, and Trump controversially promised to force insurance plans, or U.S. taxpayers, to fund the procedure, which has resulted in unknown millions of abortions and abandoned embryos.

“He even called for punishment for women who have an abortion,” says the website — based on an off-the-cuff remark Trump reversed the day after he made it in a March 2016 interview with Chris Matthews, who resigned from MSNBC four years ago. Trump explained during the 2016 campaign, “I didn’t mean punishment for women like prison” but rather that women who have abortions “punish themselves.” Numerous surveys show women suffer psychologically, and often physically, after enduring an abortion.

The section apparently praises her own administration’s foray into compelling taxpayers to fund abortion. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe we have a sacred obligation to care for our nation’s service members, veterans, [and] their families,” says the website. Last July, the Biden-Harris administration Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, called paying for abortions a “foundational, sacred obligation of military leaders.”

Amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants: Harris promises to “secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” which her website ranks below promoting gun control. She “will bring back the bipartisan border security bill,” which she called “the strongest reform in decades.” Harris promises to reward tens of millions of illegal immigrants who broke U.S. immigration law with U.S. citizenship, calling her amnesty plan “an earned pathway to citizenship.” The Biden-Harris administration has presided over record-breaking levels of illegal immigration every year in office, not counting new legal pathways they have been established for immigrants from nations such as Haiti. Previous historic levels of illegal immigration came when candidates promised, or delivered, amnesty. This “is her attempt to make permanent what we have seen, which is lawlessness,” Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) told Fox Business on Tuesday morning.

The Democratic candidate blames the broken border on Donald Trump. “Trump fail to tackle violence in our communities or fix our broken immigration system — he will make us less safe,” the Harris website states. “He’ll advance his cruel immigration agenda which includes separating children from their parents,” a policy carried out by the Obama-Biden administration and continued by the Biden-Harris administration.

The fentanyl crisis: “This past year, the number of overdose deaths in the United States declined for the first time in five years,” the website boasts. But the Biden-Harris administration presided over record-breaking numbers of overdoses, largely driven by fentanyl crossing the Southern border from Mexico. The administration’s drug policy aimed to decriminalize marijuana and promoted so-called “harm reduction” policies, which distributed crack pipes to addicts as part of taxpayer-funded “smoking kits.”

Supreme Court packing: Harris supports a plan that would overhaul the U.S. Supreme Court by “requiring [j]ustices to comply with ethics rules that other federal judges are bound by and imposing term limits.” The recent term limits plan embraced by prominent Democrats would sideline the most conservative justices and transform the court from a lifetime appointment to one continually threatened by, and responding to, political pressure.

More gun control: Harris promises to “ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” The Biden-Harris administration has applied the term “assault rifle” to America’s most popular rifle, the AR-15; California law also bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition. The vice president’s pledge to “require universal background checks” would require the government to pry into all sales, and potentially gifts, of guns between private individuals. She also vows to pass “red flag laws,” which unconstitutionally remove guns from the home of law-abiding citizens without due process, if their neighbors, criminals, or vengeful ex-boyfriends report them as mentally troubled. The laws would render those reported defenseless in their own homes.

The website notes, “As head of the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, she spearheaded policies to expand background checks and close the gun show loophole. Under her and President Biden’s leadership, violent crime is at a 50-year low, with the largest single-year drop in murders ever.” In fact, the U.S. homicide rate rose again in 2021 to 8.2 out of 100,00 according to the CDC. The homicide rate in 2022, the most recent year for which data are available, stood at 7.7, significantly higher than the 5.9 rate in 2018.

The website complains that Donald Trump “wants to arm teachers in our classrooms” in response to an ongoing string of school shootings.

Prosecuting Donald Trump? The Harris campaign website promises the Democratic presidential candidate will “fight to ensure that no former president has immunity for crimes committed while in the White House.” That comes in response to a Supreme Court ruling which granted presidents extremely limited immunity for actions carried out in his official capacity as president of the United States — not for private actions. Legal experts warn the threat of prosecution would criminalize political differences and turn the United States into a banana republic.

Nonetheless, the website claims President Trump will “bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power and go after his opponents.” Similarly, at the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow (D) warned, “Under Project 2025, Donald Trump would be able to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after his political opponents.”

“Donald Trump is a convicted criminal who only cares about himself,” the website says.

Recycling lies about Donald Trump: The issues section also misleads about the two candidates’ biographies and policy positions. “Vice President Harris grew up in a middle[-]class home as the daughter of a working mom,” says the website. But Kamala Harris grew up in the famously left-wing city of Berkeley where her father, Donald J. Harris, was “a renowned Marxist professor” and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher. The vice president also grew up in Montreal.

Donald Trump has “said he would let Russia ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to our NATO allies. And he calls soldiers who gave their lives in defense of American democracy ‘suckers’ and ‘losers,’” it says. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton — a neoconservative who has persistently criticized Trump’s non-interventionist foreign policy — called reports that President Trump disparaged fallen U.S. soldiers “simply false.” The comments from Trump, a master of overstatement, about NATO came in response to a question from a foreign leader about whether the U.S. would defend a nation that steadfastly refused to meet its obligations under the treaty to spend a requisite amount of funds on its own national defense. For decades, Trump has criticized one-sided deals in which foreign nations freeload off U.S. taxpayers.

Demonizing Trump: “Someone as dangerous as Donald Trump should never again be allowed to serve as commander-in-chief,” says the website. “Top American military generals and national security officials — including those who worked for Trump — have warned that he is ‘dangerous’ and ‘unfit’ to lead, and now he is surrounded by ultra-loyalists who enable his worst impulses.” These remarks come despite a near-fatal assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, which missed by a fraction of an inch, something the president has credited to divine intervention.

Civil rights: Kamala Harris commits herself to securing “$2 billion in funding for Offices of Civil Rights across the federal government,” which will supersize federal lawsuits against private employers who refuse to implement Woke policies on the basis of race, sexual preference, and gender identity.

Inflationary economics and price controls: Kamala Harris says that “guilding up the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency.” Yet on her watch, inflation reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in 2022, lifting costs and squeezing families across the nation. Overall groceries have risen nearly 20% over four years. The median price of a new house has more than doubled since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office. Americans must spend an extra $13,000 a year under the Biden-Harris administration to have the same standard of living they enjoyed under the Trump administration, according to one expert analysis. The spike in prices, which critics dub Bidenflation, has reduced Americans’ savings levels by 3.2%. The website notes “[h]er tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act,” which economists say carried a real price tag of $1.2 trillion and sparked inflation, in addition to piling more money onto the $35 trillion national debt. As the site also points out, “Vice President Harris cast the deciding vote on the” $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan.”

Harris has promised to implement national price controls on food and rent. She will implement the “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries,” says the website, although grocers have an extremely thin profit margin. She also promises national rent control. “Vice President Harris knows rent is too high and will sign legislation to outlaw new forms of price fixing by corporate landlords.” She claims she’ll build three million more rental units and “Vice President Harris will provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with their down payments, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.” Economists agree the policy will simply raise the price of houses by $25,000 while price controls, which failed in the 1970s, will restrict supply.

“Trump would raise rents and add $1,200 a year to the typical American mortgage,” she claims without proof.

Harris’s campaign promises she “will take on Big Pharma,” although the Biden-Harris administration passed vaccination mandates that the White House claimed applied to two-thirds of all U.S. workers, including attempting to force the approximately 25 million people employed at a workplace with at least 100 employees to take the COVID-19 shot or be fired. They also dismissed 8,400 members of the U.S. armed forces who refused to take the shot. Researchers have subsequently linked the injection to an increased risk of myocarditis and excess deaths.

“Vice President Harris will protect Social Security and Medicare against relentless attacks from Donald Trump,” who has steadfastly opposed any reform of the entitlement programs. Social Security is scheduled to become insolvent in 2033. Medicare faces the same fate in 2036.

Environmental globalism: Meeting the “global challenge” of climate change “will require global cooperation,” and she is committed to continuing “the United States’ international climate leadership,” says the Harris campaign website. The U.S. will lead global compacts on fossil fuels. “[S]he will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice.” Harris, who promised she would “absolutely” end fracking in the 2020 Democratic primaries, claims this will result in “lowering household energy costs” and “record energy production.”

Kamala warns Trump will increase gasoline prices: “Trump asked Big Oil executives to give his campaign money so he could roll back regulations and cut taxes for Big Oil to boost their profits, and Trump’s plans would push gas prices up,” she asserts. The cost of a gallon of gasoline has increased from $2.33 when President Donald Trump left office in January 2021 to a record high of $5.02 in June 2022 under Biden-Harris, despite releasing nearly half of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The cost now sits at $3.62 a gallon.

“Trump’s economic plans would also trigger a recession by mid-2025,” she said, although some economists agree America is already in a recession. The U.S. experienced the textbook definition of a recession — two consecutive quarters of economic contraction — under the Biden-Harris administration in the first two quarters of 2022. But the administration has denied the recession took place, since the panel tasked with declaring a recession, the Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research, did not formally make such a pronouncement.

PRO Act/public sector unions: “She’ll sign landmark pro-union legislation, including the PRO Act to support workers who choose to organize and bargain and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act to make the freedom for public service workers to form unions the law of the land.” The PRO Act would force millions of workers to pay union dues against their will, cripple freelance work, erase free speech and privacy rights, skew elections in favor of unionization, and radically increase the federal government’s intervention into everyday workplace disputes. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the 1935 Wagner Act codifying Americans’ right to union representation, believed public-sector unions should not exist and called militant labor tactics “unthinkable and intolerable.”

“She’ll fight to raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers,” radically altering the landscape of tipped work.

Harris’s agenda will be paid for by “making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.” The top 1% of U.S. income earners pay 46% of all federal income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays 2% of taxes.

Manufacturing jobs: “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 1.6 million manufacturing and construction jobs have been created,” Harris claims. But most of these are jobs destroyed during COVID-19 lockdowns coming back online. The Biden-Harris administration has in fact added 147,000 manufacturing jobs above the level in January 2020.

Universal preschool: “Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. … [E]nsuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care, all while ensuring that care workers are paid a living wage and treated with the dignity and respect they deserve,” the website states. However, surveys consistently show most mothers would like to remain home with their own children, at least part of the time, during their child’s formative years.

Transferring student loan debt and medical costs to taxpayers: Harris will “continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt,” she promises. “As Vice President, she also announced that medical debt will be removed from credit reports, and helped cancel $7 billion of medical debt for 3 million Americans. As President, she’ll work with states to cancel medical debt for even more Americans.”

Promising not to raise taxes on most Americans, but … : Harris is also “committed to ensuring no one earning less than $400,000 a year will pay more in taxes.” But the Biden-Harris administration has already raised fees on the middle class and working poor by:

  • expanding the number of items that must be registered under the National Firearms Act, with a $200 fee for each item;
  • reinstating the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and $695-per-person penalty, which President Trump eliminated;
  • imposing a carbon and/or methane tax. One proposal would charge companies $1,800 per ton of methane they handle (not emit), with the cost rising 2% above inflation each year;
  • increasing corporate taxes, which pass on approximately one-third of increased costs to consumers by raising prices (and another third by reducing payroll costs/hours); and
  • hiking cigarette taxes, which fall disproportionately on the working class.

She also praises tax-and-spend policies, claiming that “when the government encourages investment, it leads to broad-based economic growth and creates jobs, which makes our economy stronger.” But Paul Mueller of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) described Harris’s economic interventionism as “extensive government involvement, huge amounts of spending,” and “a giveaway campaign.”

She also plans more Woke equity, pledging to “increase access to capital for small businesses and bring venture capital to parts of middle America that have for too long been overlooked … tripling the Small Business Administration’s lending to [b]lack-owned businesses, and more than doubling small-dollar lending to Latino and women-owned businesses.”

Harris also supports increasing taxpayer-funded subsidies for the Obamacare health care exchanges.

Foreign policy: Harris says she “will always stand up for American interests in the face of China’s threats.”

“Vice President Harris will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” the website avers. “She and President Biden are working to end the war in Gaza, such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

The vice president’s website also notes her strong support for Ukraine. Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $175 billion aiding Ukraine, despite its stalled war with Russia, the Zelensky government’s well-documented corruption, and persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The website boasts that Kamala Harris has been “advising on tough decisions in the Oval Office and the Situation Room.” Harris bragged about being “the last person in the room” before Joe Biden decided on the details of the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members and left an unknown number of Americans stranded behind the Taliban’s lines.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: President Trump ROASTS the ABC moderators for not debunking Kamala’s lies!

RELATED PODCAST: The Deep State with Eric Teetsel

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EXCLUSIVE: Don Jr., Trump Campaign Thrilled With How Much Better They Think Vance Has Been Than Walz

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign and his eldest son, Don Jr., say they are thrilled with Sen. J.D. Vance’s performance on the campaign trail in comparison to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in exclusive conversations with the Daily Caller.

Trump Jr., who was one of the main forces behind Vance becoming his father’s running mate, explained to the Caller that people were “wrong” about Vance and said that he “understood the guy.” Trump Jr. and other campaign officials highlighted Vance’s media appearances, saying he is not scared to go against the liberal mainstream media, whereas Walz has continued to dodge questions from reporters on the campaign trail and has yet to sit down for a one-on-one interview since becoming the Democratic VP nominee.

“I’ve known him well and for a long time. I understand his talents. And I think every Sunday when I watch the Sunday shows or frankly, any other media, I am continually reaffirmed that me going all in for J.D. was 100% the right move,” Trump Jr. told the Caller. “But what’s also interesting is there’s plenty of people that were sort of, let’s just say, J.D. Vance, not necessarily fans or perhaps indifferent, who have since reached out to me knowing my push, knowing that they were probably pushing different directions who are straight up saying, ‘Don you are 100% right on that one. I got it wrong.’ And he’s absolutely kicking ass out on the campaign trail right now.”

Regarding other possible picks, Trump Jr. said that he believes the media would have treated whoever his father picked with disdain.

“I think the media would have done the attacks on everyone and anyone that Trump ever picked. That’s their job, as sort of the lapdog propagandists of the Democrat machine. I think they went particularly hard on J.D. But those hits just don’t fall well, because his backstory, his life story, as articulate as he is, the way he prosecutes the case,” he said. “J.D. does better in a hostile media territory than the very vast majority of Republicans do on even Fox News. And so the way he’s able to prosecute that case against the Democrats, the Harris-Biden regime, their failures, it’s just been incredible to watch.”

One of the main reasons Trump Jr. said he pushed for Vance was due to his support for the America First movement, which he said he thinks Vance can “keep going in an age beyond Trump.”

“So I think he’s just shown a level of commitment to the movement that’s amazing. I think you combine that with his other talents, his youth,” Trump Jr. told the Caller. “And my dad will be a part of this thing for hopefully a very long time. But we don’t have much of a bench on the conservative side, certainly not on the America First side that can actually play the game the way it needs to be played against the Democrats, who have just been steamrolling us for years. I think he’s one of those rare talents, on our side. So, I think I recognized that earlier than most, I think others are starting to finally get it now, and that’s great.”

“You can’t put Tim Walz and JD Vance in the same category for comparison. I mean it’s not even close,” Trump Jr. added.

Meanwhile, sources on the Trump campaign and National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt all echoed their support for Vance as Trump’s running mate and heavily criticized Walz, who has come under fire for signing legislation in favor of putting tampons in boys bathrooms, accusations of stolen valor and his history and relationship with China.

“Senator JD Vance honorably served our country in the US Marines and has truly lived the American Dream. He has proven to be a great asset to President Trump and our campaign as he barnstorms the country meeting with voters and owning the fake news media. Senator Vance certainly serves as a strong and sharp contrast to Weirdo Tim Walz, who has been one of the most radical liberal governors in the country and supports insane policies, like putting tampons in men’s bathrooms,” Leavitt told the Caller.

A senior Trump campaign official added that they are surprised Democrats have not found a way to replace Walz on their ticket, saying he is only hurting Democrats’ chance of defeating Trump.

“It’s shocking that the Democrats haven’t already done the rumored switcharoo on VP. Walz is terrible for their ticket. He came to the dance with a record of lies about his military resume, he can’t face the press without a babysitter, and despite being Governor of Minnesota, their ticket has actually lost ground in polling there since he was selected,” the senior Trump campaign official told the Caller.

Another Trump campaign official said Vance is “killing it” and has done a good job on the campaign trail.

“Besides President Trump himself, he’s the strongest advocate there is for President Trump’s policies. And unlike Kamala Harris, he’s willing to go into the lion’s den. He’ll go on Meet the Press, CNN, wherever, he’ll go do an interview, and he’ll take tough questions and he’ll come back with great answers and I think he’s been executing the case. and he’s been aggressively on the campaign trail. And we’re happy. He’s killing it,” the Trump campaign official said.

Longtime Republican strategist John Ashbrook told the Caller that Vance is “absolutely crushing it” and called Walz a phony.

“He refuses to let opposition dictate the terms of any debate and clearly delivers a message about fixing our economy and securing our border. It was very smart of President Trump to elevate the voice of a poor kid from Middletown, Ohio, who echoes the sentiments of the overlooked millions he fights for every day,” Ashbrook said. “And he offers a stark authenticity contrast with Tim Walz who’s spent his lengthy political career pretending to be something he’s not.”

AUTHOR

Henry Rodgers

Chief national correspondent.

RELATED ARTICLES:

9 States Where the Cost of Living Has Increased Most During Biden’s Presidency

RFK Jr. Successfully Withdraws Name From Wyoming Ballot

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Totally Silent’: Donald Trump Jr. Says Media Won’t Give Walz Family The Mary Trump Treatment

EXCLUSIVE: Gold Star Families Had Trouble Getting Trump Into Arlington Until House Speaker Intervened

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Your Father’s Been Shot’: Donald Trump Jr. Recounts Harrowing Moments After Attempt On Father’s Life

EXCLUSIVE: EPA Agrees To Audit Telework Policies One Year After GOP Senator’s Request

Top Biden Cabinet Official Indicates He’s Checked Out, Has No Interest In Harris Admin

RELATED VIDEO: J.D. Vance: ‘Every single member of Tim Walz’s family endorsed Donald Trump for president’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Witness Protection’: Media-Friendly Tim Walz Has Disappeared From Airwaves Since Joining Harris Ticket

/in , , , , , , , , , /by

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz rose to prominence by making the rounds in mainstream media interviews, but since being named Kamala Harris’s running mate, the “folksy”, “midwestern dad” has been missing from the airwaves.

From July 22 to Aug. 6, about two weeks before he was added to the ticket, Walz appeared on MSNBC, PBS, CNN and Fox News a total of ten times, an analysis by Newsbusters’ Curtis Houck, shared with the Daily Caller, showed. Since Harris chose Walz as her running mate on Aug. 6, the governor has not appeared on the networks he flocked to during the vetting process, according to Houck’s analysis.

“It’s no surprise that Tim Walz has gone into the witness protection program first started by the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign after blanketing the liberal cable networks during the vetting process to show Kamala Harris his loyalty to her,” Houck told the Caller.

“Between July 23 and August 6, he appeared on CNN and MSNBC at least seven times, with an additional hit on taxpayer-funded PBS. Morning and evening, Walz made sure Harris and her team saw him at all hours of the day. Importantly, none came after July 30 as the vetting intensified and Harris conducted final round interviews,” he continued.

The shift is a jarring departure from Walz’s pre-nomination media blitz, which skyrocketed him into liberal stardom and separated him from the other contenders in the VP sweepstakes.

Walz has done one tv appearance since being named Harris’ running mate; his joint interview on CNN alongside the vice president. Over the first month of her presidential campaign, Harris faced scrutiny for a lack of unscripted moments. The pressure forced Harris to commit to setting up an interview by the end of August, though rather than doing a one-on-one sit-down, she brought Walz along.

Neither Harris nor Walz have held a press conference since beginning their run, only taking a few questions from reporters in gaggles when on the road.

While Harris and Walz have done one media appearance together, Senator J.D. Vance has done 94 interviews, press conferences and gaggles with the media since Trump named him his running mate on July 15, according to Axios. In the month of August, Vance did all five major Sunday shows, the outlet reported.

“Tim Walz is in hiding, just like Kamala Harris, because Harris is a San Francisco liberal desperately pretending not to be one, and no one trusts Walz to remember every part of the fictional record the campaign staff has created for both of them. They are both radical leftists, whose policies would only send the American economy into a deeper and faster spiral, and the last thing they want anyone to do is answer questions about anything,” Tim Murtaugh, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told the Caller.

“Walz has lied about so much that they have no idea what piece of his embellished life story he’ll roll out next. Next thing you know he’ll claim to have quarterbacked the Minnesota Vikings to the Super Bowl while simultaneously serving in Afghanistan,” he added.

Before Walz was shielded from mainstream media appearances, the governor was going viral for his line of attack on Republicans. During his July 23 hit with MSNBC, Walz deemed Vance, Trump and other Republicans “weird,” a message that would prove to be a bit troublesome for Vance as he started to hit the campaign trail.

“Walz sat with incredibly friendly liberal journalists who saw no problem in helping Walz advance his case, including his astroturfed insult against former President Trump, Senator Vance and the Republican ticket as being ‘weird.’ The moniker kept Walz in the minds of liberal journalists like star-crossed lovers being unable to think of anything else after laying eyes on each other. Why? He said exactly how they feel about conservatives,” Houck told the Caller.

Scott Jennings, a longtime GOP adviser in Kentucky and veteran of numerous campaigns, told the Caller that the Harris campaign must have judged Walz as a risk to the operation and chose to sideline him as a result.

“They’ve obviously judged him to be a huge risk. His limited engagement on the CNN sit-down was ridiculously bad,” Jennings told the Caller.

After Harris named Walz her running mate, the Minnesota governor has been caught in several lies, including some about his service record.

The Harris campaign unknowingly began the unraveling of Walz’s military story after unearthing a 2018 video of the governor pushing for gun control, saying that “those weapons of war, that I carried in war” should stay only in combat. Social media users were quick to point out despite Walz’s statement, he never saw war.

Veterans in Walz’s unit previously accused him during his run for office in 2018 of retiring from the National Guard to run for Congress once it was revealed that he would be deployed to Iraq. Vance has lobbed attacks at Walz on the campaign trail, questioning why Americans should trust a guy who lied about his military record.

Veteran who knew Walz unloads on him on the @MegynKellyShow: “He’s not brave, I call him a coward because he is” pic.twitter.com/efGKk1fHjm

The Minnesota Governor is also the subject of a congressional investigation relating to his ties to the Chinese government. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray to request all documents relating to any Chinese entities that the now-governor may have interacted with while on his dozens of trips to China.

Lies aside, Jennings told the Caller that another reason for sidelining Walz could be because he would be pressed about a policy platform Harris is yet to define. More than a month into her campaign, Harris has only unveiled her economic policy and has yet to put a platform on her website. The Trump campaign, by contrast, features the Republican National Committee’s platform as its own.

“In his defense, she has no idea what her positions are so how could he be expected to know anything?” Jennings said.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House reporter. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

9 States Where the Cost of Living Has Increased Most During Biden’s Presidency

Veterans Who Knew Walz Tear Him Apart: ‘Military Impersonator,’ ‘Habitual Liar,’ ‘Coward,’ And Worse

‘Can We Get A Question At Some Point?’: Walz Ignores Shouted Question About Lowering Prices During Campaign Stop

Tim Walz Claimed He Has A Family ‘Because Of’ IVF — But His Wife Used A Different Fertility Treatment

‘Putting In The Work’: Republicans View JD Vance As Invaluable Asset As Campaign Enters Home Stretch

CNN Data Guru Says ‘Weird Attack Line’ Against JD Vance Is ‘Absolutely’ Hurting His Favorability

Attacks On Walz’s Service Lies Are Only Just Beginning, Trump Insiders Say

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Putting In The Work’: Republicans View JD Vance As Invaluable Asset As Campaign Enters Home Stretch

/in , , , , , , , /by

Republicans believe former President Donald Trump made the right choice in picking Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to be his running mate as the campaign enters the fourth quarter of the election season.

Through the final weeks of August, Vance has spent his time on the campaign trail, sparring with hostile media and drawing contrast to Vice President Kamala Harris as she dodges the media. Prior though, Vance was fighting a barrage of Democratic attacks that branded him as “weird” for past statements.

Republicans and campaign officials expressed satisfaction with Vance’s performance in conversations with the Daily Caller.

“J.D. Vance is doing what Vice President picks are supposed to do, which is aggressively make the case in the Earned Media, which is the press, the entire political world is saying, not Where’s Waldo, but where’s Walz. He’s not out there making the case in the press the way VP candidates are expected to do,” GOP strategist Mark R. Weaver told the Daily Caller.

After Trump chose Vance as his running mate, Democrats unearthed comments from a Fox News interview and a July 2021 speech about “childless cat ladies” and women who didn’t have children. Vance faced many questions about the comments, including in interviews with NBC and CNN.

Democrats used the comments alongside debunked rumors to brand Vance as “weird” — a line of attack CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten said was hurting the vice presidential candidate’s favorability.

Amidst the rocky start, Trump downplayed the importance of the vice president — a comment that pundits and social media users believed indicated je wasn’t thrilled with his pick.

“Of course he is. I wouldn’t have chosen him for my ticket if I wasn’t certain he could assume the presidency in the event of a crisis,” Trump began.

“Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact,” he continued. “I mean, virtually no impact.”

But since Vance’s battle with hostile media, Shermichael Singleton told the Daily Caller that the senator has found his footing.

“People forget this, J.D. Vance has only recently been elected to the United States Senate. This is not someone with multiple terms of political experience. And I don’t say that as a negative. I said that to say that a lot of people were saying, well, he’s floundering here, or he should be doing this, or he’s not doing that, or some of the comments, etc, you have to give someone an opportunity to kind of warm up to this,” Singleton, a GOP strategist, told the Caller.

But it wasn’t long before Vance hit a turning point when he used a question about his past comments to pivot to attack Harris.

“You’ve now asked me three questions about comments that I made three years ago,” Vance said. “I wonder what Kamala Harris thinks about the fact that she supported policies that open the American Southern border. I wonder what Kamala Harris thinks about Joe Biden’s mental faculty for the office.”

“I’m interviewing you,” Bash replied. “Not Kamala Harris.”

“You are interviewing me, Dana, because I respect the American people enough to sit down for an interview,” Vance quipped. “Kamala Harris has been the nominee for three weeks. She hasn’t sat down for a real interview.”

“I sort of always expected that the guy would eventually get into the zone, and he’s found his footing, and he appears to be more confident and more comfortable. I think one thing I would like to see more of as he has been making the case on the issues, which I think is strong,” Singleton told the Caller.

One week before, Vance had wooed Republicans after landing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, just after Harris arrived on Air Force Two. The senator walked across the tarmac to the vice presidential plane where he spoke to reporters that Harris had ignored just moments before.

Vance used the moment to highlight how Harris was yet to do a sit-down interview, give a press conference or meaningfully interact with reporters.

“J.D. Vance is fearless and he clearly gets the better of his exchanges with the media, because they come at him aggressively and he knocks down their attacks with precision,” Tim Murtaugh, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, told the Caller.  “He’s a great asset to the campaign and to President Trump. That’s exactly why the Democrats tried — and failed — to damage him with outrageous lies, because he’s so effective.”

Vance, the campaign officials told the Caller, draws stark contrast to Harris’ chosen running mate, Gov. Tim Walz.

Since joining Harris on the Democratic ticket, Walz has been caught in several lies, including some about his service record.

Walz’s military story unraveled after the Harris campaign itself unearthed a 2018 video of the governor pushing for gun control, saying that “those weapons of war, that I carried in war” should stay only in combat. Social media users were quick to point out that there was a problem with Walz’s statement — he never saw war.

Veterans part of Walz’s unit during his time in service had previously accused him in 2018 of retiring from the Guard to run for Congress once it was revealed that he would be deployed to Iraq. Vance has used the lie to hit Walz before he meets him on the debate stage, questioning why Americans should trust a guy who lied about his military record.

Walz also recently became the subject of a Congressional investigation into his ties to China. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting all documents relating to any Chinese entities that the now-governor may have interacted with while on his dozens of trips to China.

“J.D. Vance has proven to be a great asset to President Trump’s campaign,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump national press secretary, told the Caller.

“J.D. is authentic, relatable and unafraid to debate the issues as evidenced by his frequent sit-down interviews with hostile press. Meanwhile, Tampon Tim Walz is a radical liberal who lacks credibility and has turned out to be a huge liability for the Harris campaign as more and more of his egregious lies have come to light,” she continued.

Other Vance quips have gained traction in recent weeks as Harris and Walz have been repeatedly pushed to engage with the media and answer questions about policy.

During a recent rally, an audience member asked the potential vice president where his teleprompter was.

“Ma’am, I don’t need a teleprompter. I’ve actually got thoughts in my head, unlike Kamala Harris,” Vance replied.

Vance took another swipe at Harris after liberal media outlets criticized Trump for a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the 13 service members killed in the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, as a politicized event. Harris and President Joe Biden put out statements honoring the fallen soldiers, but neither had any public events scheduled to recognize the Gold Star families.

“Kamala Harris is disgraceful,” Vance said of Harris’s lack of recognition for the families. “We’re going to talk about a story out of those 13 brave, innocent Americans who lost their lives, it’s that Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened, and she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up. She can go to hell.”

Two months out from election day, Republicans have found Vance to be the perfect match for Trump on the campaign trail.

“Senator Vance is a natural complement to President Trump, and his American Dream story is resonating well with voters in the Rust Belt who feel left behind by the Biden-Harris administration,” Trump surrogate Harrison Fields told the Caller.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Tim Walz Claimed He Has A Family ‘Because Of’ IVF — But His Wife Used A Different Fertility Treatment

Attacks On Walz’s Service Lies Are Only Just Beginning, Trump Insiders Say

‘We Need Answers’: China Watchers Sound Alarm On Walz’s Cozy Relationship With Beijing

Voters Are Increasingly Ditching The Democratic Party For The GOP In Crucial Swing State

How Liberal Pollsters Are Recreating The 2016 Wave Of Silent Trump Voters

Tim Walz’s Political Origin Story Is Reportedly Full Of Holes

‘You’re A Huge Liar’: Bill Maher Pans Walz, Harris For ‘Insulting My Intelligence’ During CNN Interview

Video Shows Police Take Down Man Allegedly Attempting To Breach Trump Rally’s Media Area

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Dem Defending Walz’s Military Record Has His Own History Of Claiming Honor He Never Earned

/in , , , , , , , /by

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland falsely claimed on an application to have been awarded a Bronze Star Medal for his Army service in Afghanistan in 2006, according to The New York Times.

Moore claimed to have received the honor on a White House fellowship application in 2006, and has failed to correct television hosts who have wrongly introduced him as a recipient of the award in the past, the New York Times reported. Moore, who has also defended Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz amid his accusations of stolen valor, called the discrepancy an “honest mistake” and expressed regret for not correcting his application, according to a statement from Thursday.

“I was encouraged to fill out an application for the White House Fellowship by my deputy brigade commander,” Moore said in a statement. “In fact, he helped me edit it before I sent it in. At the time, he had recommended me for the Bronze Star. He told me to include the Bronze Star award on my application after confirming with two other senior-level officers that they had also signed off on the commendation.”

“Still, I sincerely wish I had gone back to correct the note on my application,” Moore continued. “It was an honest mistake, and I regret not making that correction.”

Moore had not received either the Bronze Star or the Combat Army Badge at the time that he submitted his application in January of 2006, the New York Times confirmed. He was eventually awarded the Combat Army Badge in May 2006, but there is no record of him ever receiving a Bronze Star.

“Over the last few weeks, our country has grown used to seeing what it looks like when a veteran’s integrity is attacked for political gain,” Moore said in the statement. “But those who seek to cast doubt on our records misunderstand something fundamental about true patriots, who have put on the flag of our country and put everything on the line to be called Americans: We don’t get shaken. We put our heads down, and we do the work. And that is what I will continue to do.”

Moore also defended another prominent Democrat who had his military record questioned. Just days after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, his statements about his military service in the National Guard were called into question.

Walz previously advocated for a ban on “weapons of war” that he said he “carried in war,” according to a video posted by Harris’ campaign on X. However, Walz never actually went into combat and reportedly retired from the Minnesota National Guard in 2005 shortly after he learned that his unit was being deployed to Iraq.

Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, called out this discrepancy and claimed that Walz “abandoned” his unit.

“Well I wonder, Tim Walz, when were you ever in war?” Vance said during a campaign event. “What was this weapon that you carried into war given that you abandoned your unit right before they went to Iraq and he has not spent a day in a combat zone? What bothers me about Tim Walz is the stolen valor garbage.”

Moore responded to Vance and defended Walz in an August MSNBC interview, saying that anyone who has served the country “deserves our utmost respect.”

“You don’t get to sergeant major just because,” Moore said in the interview. “You get to sergeant major because you’ve served this country.”

AUTHOR

Rebeka Zeljko

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Tim Walz Appears To Ignore Shouted Questions About ‘Stolen Valor’ Accusation

Tim Walz Claimed He Has A Family ‘Because Of’ IVF — But His Wife Used A Different Fertility Treatment

Wealthy Donors Quietly Tell Harris To Throw Capital Gains Tax Policy Overboard

EXCLUSIVE: Jim Jordan Starts Inquiry Into Jack Smith’s Superseding Indictment Of Trump

Voters Are Increasingly Ditching The Democratic Party For The GOP In Crucial Swing State

How Liberal Pollsters Are Recreating The 2016 Wave Of Silent Trump Voters

Tim Walz’s Political Origin Story Is Reportedly Full Of Holes

‘You’re A Huge Liar’: Bill Maher Pans Walz, Harris For ‘Insulting My Intelligence’ During CNN Interview

Video Shows Police Take Down Man Allegedly Attempting To Breach Trump Rally’s Media Area

RELATED VIDEO: Trump COMRADE KAMALA ad is absolute FIRE AND BRIMSTONE..

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Tim Walz’s Lies: The Top 7

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

CNN thinks it understands what sets Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz apart from the average politician: honesty. “[W]hat Walz has — and it’s rare in politics these days — is that he’s totally comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is. He’s authentic. And he doesn’t try to be someone else,” said CNN’s Chris Cillizza.

Yet Walz stands accused of purveying a string of lies, errors, and prevarications stretching back to his earliest days in politics, fibbing about everything from his military service to whether he won an obscure award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce as a 29-year-old man. Here is a far-from-exhaustive list of the mistruths Walz has communicated.

1. Stolen Valor #1: Serving in War

Tim Walz served 24 years in the National Guard, an honorable action worthy of praise in its own right. During his National Guard service, Walz was stationed in Norway and, when a different unit deployed to Afghanistan, he took their place in Vicenza, Italy from August 3, 2003, until 2004, according to NPR. Walz retired in 2005, as the unit he led was about to be deployed to Iraq.

Yet over the years, he has implied he faced combat during the War on Terror, as well as allowing others to repeat the claim without correction. In a video clip the Harris-Walz campaign shared of a 2018 event calling for gun control legislation against law-abiding citizens in violation of the Second Amendment, Walz said, “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”

The campaign muddied the waters, telling CNN, “In his 24 years of service, the [g]overnor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times. Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country.” A Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson, Lauren Hitt, later claimed Walz “misspoke.”

Yet the errors had piled up for years. A 2006 article in The Atlantic claimed Walz faced a hostile interrogation at a George W. Bush rally after security saw evidence that Walz supported 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry:

“His challenge prompted a KGB-style interrogation that was sadly characteristic of Bush campaign events. Do you support the president? Walz refused to answer. Do you oppose the president? Walz replied that it was no one’s business but his own. (He later learned that his wife was informed that the Secret Service might arrest him.) Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who’d just returned from fighting the war on terrorism.”

Numerous video clips have shown figures, including then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), claiming Walz served in combat, without any correction, provoking charges that Walz engaged in “stolen valor.”

A group of 50 military veterans in Congress wrote a letter to Walz expressing their “grave concern” over the fact that Walz may be “a heartbeat away from becoming the Commander-In-Chief. You’ve already demonstrated your unwillingness to lead in time of war and a lack of honor through your blatant misrepresentations exploiting and co-opting the experiences of America’s combat veterans for personal gain.”

The lead author of the letter — Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) — lost both legs while serving in Afghanistan.

“America’s veterans and servicemembers are rightfully concerned about what would happen to them should you ascend to the Presidency. When America asked you to lead your troops into War, you turned your back on your troops.”

“Until you admit you lied to them, there is no way you can be trusted to serve as Vice President,” they wrote.

Those who served in uniform seem the most upset.

Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who escaped Appalachian poverty first by enlisting in the Marine Corps, before enrolling in Ohio State University and Yale, said when his country “asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it. I did what they asked me to do, and I did it honorably. When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with.”

“For 20 years, they let this guy go by with a lie that he deployed to Iraq, which he didn’t, and that he retired as a command sergeant major, which he did not. I mean, that’s just blatant lies,” said Hung Cao, a retired Navy captain and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia.

“I served in the Minnesota National Guard with him. He literally abandoned us when we were about to be deployed to Iraq. He’s a coward and should be treated as such,” stated J.R. Salzman. Multiple members of Walz’s unit, including a chaplain, have spoken out against Walz’s misrepresentation of his military record.

Legacy media outlets, so quick to pounce or artifice any misstatement from President Donald Trump, have proven remarkably understanding about Walz’s erroneous comments. The New York Times ran an article “Explaining Claims About Tim Walz’s Military Service,” which noted that four veterans “do not believe the governor is guilty of ‘stolen valor,’ but that he did misrepresent his record at times.” Some seemingly confessed that they have concerns over the political impact of Walz’s claims, which legacy media fact-checkers minimize or otherwise spin. “False and misleading claims of such a trivial nature might not seem particularly harmful, but a deluge of them could easily add up to real damage at the polls, according to experts. This is especially true when they go after a figure such as Walz, who is still relatively unknown on the national stage,” admitted CBS News.

Yet a few have corrected the record. “There is no evidence that at any time Governor Walz was in the position of being shot at, and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest that he was. So that is absolutely false when he said that about gun rights out there,” said CNN correspondent Tim Foreman. More recently, USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques referred to Walz’s “disturbing record” as “a bit of a fabulist.”

2. Stolen Valor #2: ‘Retired Command Sergeant Major’

Walz has repeatedly referred to his rank as “retired command sergeant major,” including in the official Walz-Harris campaign biography. Yet Walz actually retired as a master sergeant, because he failed to complete required coursework at the U.S. Sergeants Major Academy when he quit his unit in 2005 to run for U.S. Congress.

“You have stated that you are ‘damn proud’ of your service, and like any American veteran, you should be. But there is no honor in lying about the nature of your service,” stated a letter from 50 veterans serving in Congress. “Repeatedly claiming to be a ‘Retired Command Sergeant Major’ when you did not complete the requirements was not honorable. Nor was it honorable to claim to carry weapons ‘in war’ when you had not served in war, and abandoning the men and women under your leadership just as they were getting ready to deploy was certainly not honorable either.”

Eventually, the Harris-Walz campaign website stealth edited Walz’s biography. Yet in an official video shown on the third night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention before his vice presidential acceptance speech, said that Walz “served 24 years in the National Guard, rising to Command Sergeant Major.”

3. Walz Claimed His Wife Conceived through IVF

The Democratic Party has repeatedly claimed the 2022 Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, has unleashed a torrent of pro-life laws that threaten everything from miscarriage care to in vitro fertilization (IVF). Tim Walz claimed to have a very “personal” connection to IVF, claiming he and his wife, Gwen, owe their two children to IVF.

In fact, Walz invoked the Lord’s divine providence for the controversial procedure. “Thank God for IVF, my wife and I have two beautiful children,” Walz told MSNBC in July. Walz weaponized the issue against J.D. Vance in August, alleging, “If it was up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.” (Vance has spoken in favor of IVF, a controversial procedure in which nine out of 10 children are never born and unknown millions have been “discarded,” aborted, or abandoned.)

But in an August 19 interview with Walz’s wife, Gwen, Glamour magazine reported that the couple did not conceive via IVF at all. The Walzes participated in a different fertility procedure, known as intrauterine insemination (IUI), in which sperm are injected into the uterus. Gwen Walz thanked a nurse in her neighborhood who assisted her “with the shots I needed as part of the IUI process.”

The Harris-Walz campaign attempted to defend Walz’s misleading IVF statements. “Governor Walz talks how normal people talk,” said Mia Ehrenberg, a campaign spokeswoman. “He was using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments.”

Despite Democratic claims to the contrary, IVF was never threatened by an 8-1 Alabama Supreme Court ruling which allowed the parents of children negligently destroyed in IVF clinics to file a civil case under the state’s 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

4. Walz Misled about His 1995 DUI

As a candidate for Congress in 2006, Tim Walz apparently misled voters about his 1995 arrest for driving under the influence. Walz had claimed the entire arrest was a misunderstanding, based on hearing loss from his valorous military service. But CNN reported:

“According to court and policerecords connected to the incident, Walz admitted in court that he had been drinking when he was pulled over for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone in Nebraska. Walz was then transported by a state trooper to a local hospital for a blood test, showing he had a blood alcohol level of .128, well above the state’s legal limit of 0.1 at the time.”

Walz accepted a plea deal, admitting that he put himself and others in danger by getting behind the wheel.

“It’s just a dangerous situation,” Walz said in a court transcript, which Alpha News, a conservative Minnesota outlet uncovered in 2022. “Not just to myself, but to others who aren’t even involved with it.”

5. ‘Outstanding Young Nebraskan’?

When Walz ran for the House of Representatives in 2006, his official campaign biography stated that in 1993, he “was named the Outstanding Young Nebraskan by the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce for his service in the education, military, and small business communities.” Yet he never won any such award.

“We researched this matter and can confirm that you have not been the recipient of any award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce,” wrote Barry Kennedy, then-president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, in November 2006. “I am not going to draw a conclusion about your intentions by including this line in your biography. However, we respectfully request that you remove any reference to our organization as it could be considered an endorsement of your candidacy.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed Walz’s opponent, Gil Gutknecht, who told The Washington Free Beacon that the fabrication “fits a pattern of misleading and fabricated statements he has made throughout his political and personal life.”

Walz’s campaign later updated the biography, claiming he won an award from the “Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce.” His campaign manager waved off the controversy, telling local media the misstatement had been a “typographical error.”

6. Phony Headlines

Despite the Democratic Party’s continual warning about misinformation — something Tim Walz has erroneously said is not protected by the First Amendment — the Harris-Walz campaign has doctored headlines in its online advertisements.

The campaign reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign ads that presented actual news stories from the Associated Press, USA Today, NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS News, and other outlets — but with glowing headlines written by campaign staffers. The intention is to convince readers the unbiased reporters heaped praise on the candidates.

Some of the website’s purveyors say the campaign’s actions have undermined their journalistic integrity. “They lied to every single person that saw that ad. It’s misleading, it’s dishonest, and it hurts us as the company, our news brand,” Steve Hallstrom, president and managing partner of Flag Family Media, told the Daily Caller in August.

7. ‘White Guy Tacos’

Tim Walz appears to have even misled the American people about his pallet. In an online video, he apparently stated that “black pepper” is the spiciest food he eats, although Walz has a taste for spicy food.

In the video, Walz gestures toward a table and tells Kamala Harris, “I have white guy tacos.”

“What does that mean? Like, mayonnaise and tuna? What are you doing?” replied Harris, repeating a racial stereotype.

“Pretty much ground beef and cheese,” explained Walz.

When Harris asks if he “put any flavor in it,” Walz said, “No,” because “black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota.”

“Listen, I’m just not much of a spice guy,” said Walz, posting the clip on social media.

Yet in Minnesota, Walz is apparently known for enjoying spicy food. In January 2022, Walz referred to his “award-winning recipe for Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish” (which contains chiles and other peppers) online.

Rolling Stone magazine, which has a strained relationship with the truth, described Walz’s original comments as a “joke.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

RELATED ARTICLES:

Voters Are Increasingly Ditching The Democratic Party For The GOP In Crucial Swing State

How Liberal Pollsters Are Recreating The 2016 Wave Of Silent Trump Voters

Tim Walz’s Political Origin Story Is Reportedly Full Of Holes

‘You’re A Huge Liar’: Bill Maher Pans Walz, Harris For ‘Insulting My Intelligence’ During CNN Interview

Video Shows Police Take Down Man Allegedly Attempting To Breach Trump Rally’s Media Area

RELATED VIDEO: Comrade Kamala, “With a stroke of my pen I could have someone arrested.”

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

VIDEO: Harris Fails To Explain Flip-Flops, Says She Has No Regrets About Biden In First Interview

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

Vice President Kamala Harris stepped out of the shadows for her first sit-down interview since launching her campaign Thursday, in which she failed to explain why her aides have reversed several of her policy stances and reflected on her time serving with President Joe Biden.

More than a month after becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, Harris’ campaign finally agreed for her sit for an interview with CNN accompanied by her running mate Gov. Tim Walz. In an interview just under half an hour, Harris and Walz answered questions about the governor’s military service lies and Harris’s flip-flops since her last run for president.

CNN’s Dana Bash opened the interview by asking Harris what she would accomplish on day one should she win the presidential election. After Harris told Bash she would “strengthen the middle class” and kicked it to Walz to provide his insight, the CNN host doubled down.

“So you have been vice president for three and a half years, the steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?” Bash asked.

“Well, first of all, we had to recover as an economy, and we have done that. I’m very proud of the work that we have done that has brought inflation down to less than 3%, the work that we have done to cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month for seniors. Donald Trump said he was going to do a number of things, including allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Never happened. We did it,” Harris said.

Bash moved on to ask Harris about a series of flip-flops her campaign aides had made on behalf of the vice president.

“When you were in Congress, you supported the green New Deal, and in 2019 you said, quote, ‘There is no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.’ Fracking, as you know, is a pretty big issue, particularly in your must win state of Pennsylvania. Do you still want to ban fracking?” Bash asked.

Harris first told the CNN host that she no longer wanted to ban fracking and that she had made that clear in 2020. Bash pointed out that Harris had previously said in a 2019 town hall that she did in fact want to ban fracking. The CNN host proceeded to ask the vice president why she wanted to change her 2019 position during 2020.

Bash also hit Harris for her role overseeing the border crisis during her time as vice president. Harris was asked if she still believes border crossings should be decriminalized, a position she took during her 2019 campaign. She did not directly answer the question, simply stating that she believes in “consequence” and that “we have laws that have to be followed and enforced”

Amid the flip-flops within the interview, Bash asked the vice president how she expected the American people to interpret her policy platform — which still is not defined on her campaign website.

“Generally speaking, how should voters look at some of the changes that you’ve made that you explained some of here in your policy? Is it because you have more experience now and you’ve learned more about the information? Is it because you were running for president in a Democratic primary, and should they feel comfortable that what you’re saying now is going to be your policy moving forward?

“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is that my values have not changed,” Harris began. “You mentioned the green New Deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the inflation Reduction Act. We have set goals for the United States of America, and by extension, the globe around when we should meet certain standards for reducing house gas emissions, as an example, that value has not changed.”

CNN also dove into Biden’s disastrous debate performance which put in motion the effort to oust the president and replace him with Harris. After Biden stumbled through a June 27 debate performance against Trump, Democrats sounded the alarm on the 81-year-old’s fitness for office and ability to be president for a second term. Amid the post-debate hysteria, Harris took to CNN to defend the president’s health and mental acuity.

“Do you have any regrets about what you told the American people [about Biden’s health]?” Bash asked.

“Not at all,” Harris responded, explaining Biden’s loyalty towards the American people.

The interview did not entirely focus on Harris. After sitting quietly for the first half of the interview, Walz took questions about his series of lies, including about his military record.

Walz’s military record previously came under fire after the Harris campaign shared a 2018 video of the potential vice president pushing for gun control, saying that “those weapons of war, that I carried in war” should stay only in combat. The governor, however, never saw combat.

Bash pushed Walz to explain if he misspoke twice.

“I said we were talking about, in this case, this was after a school shooting. The ideas of carrying these weapons of war and my wife, the English teacher, tells me my grammar is not always correct, but again, if it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog, I’m not going to do that. And the one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another member’s service in any way. I never have. I never will,” the governor said.

Walz was also caught lying about he and his wife using in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments to help start a family, as well as a past DUI.

“You had to clarify that you had said that you and your wife used IVF, but it turned out you used a different kind of fertility in order to have children. And then, when you ran for Congress in 2006 to campaign, you repeatedly made false statements about a 1995 arrest for drunken reckless driving. What do you say to voters who aren’t sure whether they can take you at your word?” Bash asked.

Walz began his answer telling Bash he had former students and veterans who served with him who can vouch for his character. The governor then pivoted to talk about he and Harris’s opponents.

“I certainly own my mistakes when I make them. The one thing I’ll tell you is I wished in this country we wouldn’t have to do this. I spoke about our infertility issues, because it’s hell, and families know this. And I spoke about the treatments that were available to us, that had beautiful children there. That’s quite a contrast in folks that are trying to take those rights away from us,” Walz began.

“And so I think people know who I am. They know that record. They’ve seen that I’ve taught thousands of students. I’ve been out there, and I won’t apologize for speaking passionately, whether it’s guns in schools or protecting reproductive rights, the contrast could not be clear between what we’re running against,” he continued.

Speaking for less than thirty minutes, Harris and Walz left more to be answered for on what their campaign stands for, but for some, it was at least somewhat satisfying.

“Maybe she didn’t score a touchdown tonight, but she moved the ball down the field,” Ashley Allison, former national coalitions director for Biden-Harris 2020 campaign, said afterwards on CNN.

AUTHOR

Reagan Reese

White House correspondent. Follow Reagan on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Kamala Harris Used To Think Border Wall Was ‘Un-American.’ Now She Supports It.

Kamala Harris Fails To Distance Herself From Left-Wing 2020 Campaign, Despite Aides’ Best Efforts

Biden-Harris Whataboutism About Israel and the Palestinians

Michael Moore says Kamala Harris would be ‘most progressive’ president in history: ‘I feel so hopeful’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Socialism Never Works

/in , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Will the 2024 election be a referendum on socialism? Socialism, in the name of “neighborliness,” acts as if money grows on trees. It does not.

Socialism is forced redistribution of wealth by the government. In confiscatory taxes, the government takes from the productive to give to the poor. It may sound good to the naïve, but in reality, it hurts the poor more than anyone because its policies cause inflation. The only ones who really benefit from socialism are the administrators.

The dirty little secret about socialism is that it fails every time. Long before we became a country, the Pilgrims were forced to practice a form of socialism.

We explain the details of the Pilgrims’ experiment in socialism in our Providence Forum documentary, “The Pilgrims.”

One of the stipulations of the London Adventurers, a group of investors who had lent money to the Pilgrims for the voyage of the Mayflower, was that everyone in the colony was to divide all the proceeds of the colony equally…no matter how much work he or she did. The problem with this imposition is that those who worked hard were paid just the same as those who chose not to work at all. This incentivizing of laziness undercut productivity immensely.

One guest the program was Dennis Prager, the founder of PragerU. He told our viewers: “The Pilgrims did experiment with socialism or communalism, and they realized it didn’t work. They embodied this. It didn’t take long to realize that doesn’t work. It is against human nature. The moment you tell people that the community will take care of you, they work less. It undermines character.”

Leo Martin, the founder of the Jenney Museum/Learning Center in Plymouth, added, “in 1623, Governor Bradford changed the deal. We’re going to stop a communal existence; we’re going to go to land ownership. Every family will own their own land, grow their own food, and feed themselves, and we’ll trade with each other what we have left over.  Free trade, that worked, they never had a starving day after that, they tripled their production….Shows you what an incentive will do; works every time.”

About this episode, law professor John Eidsmoe writes: “The Pilgrims did not abandon their ideal of a Christian colony; they embraced it. They abandoned an imposed system contrary to the laws of God and the nature of man, embracing instead a system consistent with biblical principles and human nature.”

The 20th century saw one failed experiment in socialism after another, including the Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan used to collect jokes that Russians would tell each other in the Soviet Union, to ameliorate the misery of living under Communism. Such as the one about the man trying to buy a car, somewhat of a rarity for the common people in those days.

The man fulfilled his obligations, including paying all the money for the car up front. The bureaucrat told him that he had successfully completed his paperwork–and he would get his car in ten years. The man asked, “In the morning or the afternoon?” The bureaucrat was taken aback and replied, “Comrade, it’s ten years from now. What do you care whether it’s the morning or the afternoon?” The man said, “Well, I’ve got the plumber coming in the morning.”

Here in modern America, the federal government is bankrupting our children and grandchildren.

For example, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes the federal government spent $6.1 trillion in 2023, and we received $4.4 trillion in revenue. The rest was borrowed. And it’s been like this for a few years now. This is an unsustainable path.

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp how big a trillion is, compared to a million or a billion.

If I owed you $100 and said I’d pay you in a million seconds, you’d be repaid in 12 days.

If I owed you $100 and said I’d pay you in a billion seconds, you’d be repaid in 32 years.

If I owed you $100 and said I’d pay you in a trillion seconds, you’d be repaid in 32,000 years.

And we have deficit spending year after year of more than a trillion dollars.

Thomas Jefferson warned us so long ago: “I place…public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements.”

Finally, our third president added, “If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.”

We the people get decide on which path we choose in the 2024 election.

©2024. Jerry Newcombe, D. Min. All rights reserved.

Revised 2024 Democratic Platform More Extreme than the Draft

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

The final version of the Democratic Party’s 2024 Platform has added references calling transgender procedures “medically necessary,” claiming that Christian schools may further “discrimination,” shifting blame on the U.S. border to the previous administration, and promising American children a more “multilingual” education. The platform maintains its promises to keep “fighting” parents’ efforts to keep pornographic books out of children’s hands, expanding abortion nationwide, and promoting transgender procedures for children and prisoners.

Delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Committee in Chicago adopted the revised platform last week inside Chicago’s United Center. The final version contains minor modifications from the draft platform, which was released on July 13 and obtained by Politico. At that time, Joe Biden remained the presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate.

Curiously, the 2024 Democratic Party Platform did not update that previous version’s references to the nominee’s name: It contains 20 references to 2024 being an election for Joe Biden’s “second term.” For example, the 2024 platform states, “In his second term, President Biden will continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion” and “stand with Ukraine.” It contains less than 10 references to Kamala Harris in an individual capacity, rather than conjoined with Joe Biden or as part of the “Biden-Harris administration.”

Yet the alterations made between the two drafts indicate a Democratic Party moving ever further to the Left. The revised platform added a brand new promise — not to average citizens but to the transgender industry: “Democrats will vigorously oppose state and federal bans on gender-affirming health care and respect the role of parents, families, and doctors — not politicians — in making health care decisions.”

Yet Minnesota Governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (D) signed a bill disrespecting the role of parents in their children’s health care by allowing children whose parents will not allow them to undergo transgender procedures to flee to Minnesota, a “sanctuary” where the state will reassign custody until the child has undergone a transition against his/her parents’ wishes. Walz also signed a bill outlawing so-called “conversion therapy,’ even if parents and children want it.” The 2024 Democratic Party Platform doubles down on transgender procedures, adding that Biden “protected transgender Americans’ access to health care and coverage, including medically necessary gender-affirming care” (emphasis added).

The platform also strengthened promises to come after individuals accused of holding the wrong positions on hot-button issues. The revised platform changed its promise of “protecting LGBTQI+ children from bullying and assault” to stopping anti-LGBTQI+ “bullying and discrimination” (emphasis added). The platform still mentions the party’s intent to prosecute “hate crimes,” noting, “The Justice Department is taking an all-of-department approach to protecting LGBTQI+ rights.”

That promise may be directed at Christian schools, which may lose federal funding for holding to biblical morality under the vague language of the 2024 Democratic Party Platform. A new section added to the platform states: “We oppose the use of private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education. Public tax dollars should never be used to discriminate” (emphasis added). Teachers’ unions and LGBTQ pressure groups have accused Christian schools of “discrimination,” because they do not allow teachers who flout biblical morality to set that example for their students, or because they do not allow GSA Networks clubs like the one Tim Walz founded in his high school, which promotes transgender transitions without parental notification. Traditional Christianity teaches that one’s biological sex is unalterable, a gift from God, and should be treasured, as well as opposing all sexual activity outside biblical marriage.

The revised platform also deals with language, promising a greater cacophony inside public schools: “[W]e’re working to provide every student with a pathway to multilingual education, while ensuring equitable access to a high-quality education for English learners, who’ve historically been underserved.”

The revised platform pledges to tax U.S. citizens and their communities to facilitate giving U.S. citizenship to non-citizen immigrants. A new sentence states the Harris administration “will also help to fund community-based organizations that host clinics to assist with immigration cases.”

Seemingly, the revised platform added references to the LGBTQIA+ movement wherever possible. The revised platform adds that, not only did President Joe Biden pardon gay veterans, but he “pardoned approximately 2,000 gay,lesbian, and bisexual veterans who were convicted years ago just for being themselves” (emphasis added). Again, “President Biden … expanded funding for campus sexual assault prevention and is keeping students safe on campus by restoring and strengthening protections under Title IX, including explicit protections for LGBTQI+ students” (emphasis added). At other times, it worsens the reputation of those who disagree. It notes that Biden and Harris “reversed Trump’s un-American ban on transgender service members and ended the disgraceful and discriminatory ban on blood donation by gay and bisexual men” (emphasis added). It also replaced the term “gay” with the ever-more expansive “LGBTQI+.”

The platform still contains its promise to expand taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand nationwide: “With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe [v. Wade] the law of the land again. … We will repeal the Hyde Amendment. And in his second term, President Biden will continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion, appoint leaders at the FDA who respect science and appoint judges who uphold fundamental freedoms.”

A second abortion-related plank invokes the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, a relic of the 1970s feminist movement led by Gloria Steinem. “Democrats will fight to make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land,” although the never-ratified ERA has been interpreted to codify both a constitutional right to abortion and women’s eligibility for the military draft.

At times, the revision nods toward reality. It edits a sentence saying “the cost of living can still feel too high” to say the cost of living “is too high.”

The revision specifies that national rent control is coming in a Harris-Walz administration. A new sentence states that their housing policy “offers corporate landlords a basic choice for the next two years: either cap rent increases at 5 percent, or lose a valuable federal tax break.” The new platform added another line on housing policy: “and we will go after negligent landlords who don’t maintain basic habitability standards. We will also crack down on those who violate the Fair Housing Act, and on landlords who discriminate against low-income and minority renters and people with housing vouchers.” The Obama-Biden administration ignored written law and interpreted the Fair Housing Act as though it applied to people who identify as transgender. If you are renting out a room in your home but do not want your children sharing a bathroom with a trans-identifying male, you could become the target of a federal lawsuit.

A new section also alleges that former President Donald Trump “and his allies benefit directly from the housing shortage.”

The language does soften some of its anti-Trump rhetoric in light of the July 13 assassination attempt. Rather than saying, “Trump is a greater danger to democracy than ever,” the revised platform states, “Trump refuses to defend core tenets of our democracy: the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of checks and balances.” In two other instances, the platform changes some variant of the word “threat” to softer language (e.g., “The stakes in this election for the soul of our nation are profound.”). It also deletes a sentence stating Trump “has never respected service because he does not understand sacrifice.”

Yet it seeks to blame Trump and others for an historic influx of illegal immigrants over the last four years, and away from the Biden-Harris administration, discussing “a broke immigration system decades in the making” (emphasis added).

The revised platform contains the pledges made in the previous draft, as well, to continue “fighting” alleged “book bans.”

Since delegates did not revise the nominee’s name — or pronouns — the platform gives an insight into what a Joe Biden reelection campaign might have looked like. Until her rebranding as the candidate of “joy,” Kamala Harris was seen as the weaker link on the ticket, with major publications calling on her to drop out so Biden could choose a stronger running mate in articles with titles such as “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris,” in New York Magazine last September, or “For the country’s sake, Vice President Harris should step aside” in The Washington Post this March.

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee adopted a slimmed-down document containing only a handful of campaign promises that resonated with Donald Trump’s campaign. Notably, the 2024 Republican Party Platform jettisoned its traditional language vowing to protect life from the moment of conception until natural death. Over the weekend, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance indicated that President Donald Trump opposed any federal legislation to protect life, leaving the matter entirely to the states.

That is, however, significantly less pro-abortion than the 2024 Democratic Party Platform.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Facebook Founder Confesses Censorship of Conservatives Was Ordered by Biden-Harris Admin.

Biden-Harris DEI Policies at NASA Favor ‘Inclusivity’ over Quality of Research, Experts Say

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand c0lumn is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The abortion of truth at the Democratic National Convention

/in , , , , , , , , , , /by

When the topic of abortion came up at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, truth got dismembered.

How so? By lots of talk about justifying abortion as “reproductive freedom,” “reproductive rights,” and “reproductive health care.”

Thinking people should, well, think.

Reproductive freedom justifies abortion?

No, it doesn’t.

Reproduction, i.e., the creation of a child (pre-natal human being/person) conceived via sex, occurs before abortion takes place. Reproductive freedom is exercised before abortion takes place.

The late Michael Bauman, Professor of Theology and Culture at Hillsdale College, observes: “When pro-choicers have unforced sex, they are choosing. That is freedom of choice. When they decide to kill the child conceived during that sexual encounter, that is freedom from choice. They chose; now they want to be free from the consequences of that choice, even if someone has to die.”

In other words, justifying abortion via “reproductive freedom” is a ruse.

Note: The hard cases — rape, incest, threat to life of the mother — to which many abortion-choice proponents point as justification for abortion account for fewer than 5 percent of all abortion cases. In his 2015 book The Abortion Wars ethicist Charles Camosy reports that the number for the hard cases is 2 percent. But here (and at the DNC) we’re not talking about the hard cases, so don’t get sidetracked.

Again, to justify abortion — i.e., 95–98 percent of all abortions — via “reproductive freedom” is a ruse.

Reproductive rights justify abortion?

No, they don’t.

Every adult has a right to reproduce. That is, every adult has a right to reproduce via consensual sex if they are biologically capable and, preferably (for the sake of the children), if they are married.

But, again, reproduction occurs before abortion takes place. This means that the exercise of one’s right to reproduce occurs before abortion takes place, too. (If this is unclear, re-read previous point about reproductive freedom.)

So justifying abortion via “reproductive rights” is also a ruse.

Reminder: Along with reproductive rights come reproductive responsibilities. Parents have duties to their children. The first duty is to care for children, not kill them. Other duties include provision of food, clothing, shelter, education — and lots of love.

Reproductive health care justifies abortion?

No, it doesn’t.

Dr Kendra Kolb, a neonatologist, states this: “There is no medical reason why the life of the child must be directly and intentionally ended with an abortion procedure.”

Kolb adds: Yes, treatments for ectopic pregnancies occur, but they’re not abortions per se, if we use language accurately. Yes, treatments for heart disease or cancer can involve pre-term deliveries that might result in the death of a child, but they’re not abortions per se, if we use language accurately. When we accurately define “abortion” as the direct and intentional ending of a pre-natal human being’s life, abortions are not medically necessary.

Abortion, then, is not health care at all, let alone reproductive health care.

So justifying abortion via “reproductive health care” is yet another ruse.

Don’t be fooled

That the premeditated killing of pre-natal human beings via abortion is justified by reproductive freedom, reproductive rights, or reproductive health care is simply not true.

Folks, don’t be fooled by the falsehoods.

What do you think about politicisation of abortion in this year’s American election?   

AUTHOR

Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, is a retired philosophy professor (formerly at Providence University College, Manitoba, Canada) and author of the book Untangling Popular Pro-Choice Arguments: Critical Thinking about Abortion.

For additional thought

RELATED ARTICLE: Three simple reasons why a vote for Trump is still a vote for pro-life

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

EXCLUSIVE: Tim Walz Has A History Of Rubbing Elbows With Nonprofit Linked To Chinese Intel And Influence Agency

/in , , , , , , , /by

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, has a long history of attending events organized by members of a nonprofit with connections to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence and intelligence agency, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.

Since 2018, Walz has attended multiple events hosted by members of the Chinese American Association of Minnesota (CAAM) and related organizations, including one 2022 fundraiser for his gubernatorial campaign, according to a DCNF review of dozens of Chinese government announcements, Chinese-language news reports and social media posts.

Other media have detailed self-declared progressive Walz’s long-standing relationships with entities connected to Islamic extremism as well.

Since 2016, CAAM and another local nonprofit have been hosting the St. Paul branch of the “Overseas Chinese Service Center” (OCSC) program, which is a global network of institutions overseen by the Chinese government’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), the DCNF previously reported.

Among other things, the UFWD “collects intelligence, exerts control over overseas Chinese-language media outlets, seeks to influence Chinese diaspora groups, facilitates illicit technology transfer, and interferes in politics in other countries,” according to the House Select Committee on the CCP.

On at least one occasion, a member of the St. Paul, Minnesota OCSC also took part in meetings and training sessions organized by China’s national police authority, the DCNF found. The DCNF has reported on other Chinese government-linked operations, including a June 2024 investigation detailing how an online network run by a self-identified Chinese “cyber police” officer provides Chinese illegal immigrants with resources to get into the U.S. and evade border authorities.

CAAM did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Democratic vice presidential nominee’s dozens of trips to China as an educator have come under intense scrutiny from China hawks and Republican lawmakers like Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who recently sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting information pertaining to “any Chinese entity or individual with whom Mr. Walz may have engaged or partnered.”

AUTHOR

Philip Lenczycki

Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter, political journalist, and China watcher. Twitter: @LenczyckiPhilip

RELATED ARTICLES:

EXCLUSIVE: Online Network Run By Chinese ‘Cyber Police’ Agent Promotes Prostitution, Sex Trafficking In The US

‘Training Walz’: Harris Brings Along VP Pick For Her First Sit-Down Interview

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Going Full Orwell: Harris-Walz Equate Fighting ‘Climate Change’ With ‘Freedom’

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

Shh. A moment of ‘climate silence’ being observed on live TV – Morano on Fox & Friends on Harris-Walz ‘climate silence’ & pushing climate solutions as ‘freedom’

Harris Goes Full Orwell! 

NYT: Harris’s New Strategy: Equate Fighting Climate Change With ‘Freedom’ – Framing As ‘Patriotism’ – ‘A novel way of framing climate change’

New York Times – Aug. 23, 2024: Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned climate change just once in her speech before the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, wrapping it into her larger campaign theme of freedom. … Ms. Harris declared that along with reproductive choice “many other fundamental freedoms are at stake” in the November election. Those include “the freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis,” she said. …

Via Study.com’s Analysis of George Orwell’s 1984 & the meaning of ‘Freedom is Slavery:  “The slogan coined by Big Brother goes on to explain that freedom is slavery…Big Brother justifies this confusion by saying that someone who is free under the typical conception, able to operate according to their own will, is ultimately unsuccessful. Rather, true freedom is serving the state, which allows one to operate with more freedom than they ever would have had if they went out into the world on their own.”

Marc Morano: This is this is the biggest con I’ve seen in modern politics. Kamala Harris in 2019 was the co-sponsor of The Green New Deal — the AOC original Green New Deal, and as you mentioned, Harris cast a breaking vote in 2022 for the Inflation Reduction Act. Climate is supposed to be an existential threat. Climate is supposed to be in crisis —  an emergency. The Biden-Harris Administration was talking openly — as The Washington Post and Associated Press reported — declaring a National Climate emergency — and all of a sudden, summer of 2024, everything went silent. And why is that? Because according to the Washington Post, the New York Times, they have found in focus groups, they have found in polling, they have found this across the board — that there’s just no concern over climate change in America. It’s dropped even in these polls by the mainstream media, out of the top 20 issues, it’s not even in the top half, and so what’s happened is they’ve just moved on, and they’re framing it now, according to the New York Times, as an issue of ‘freedom’ —  climate ‘solutions’ will bring ‘freedom.’ This is after they talked about banning gas-powered cars, restricting meat eating, banning gas stoves and thermostat controls, and CNN promoting ‘carbon passports’ for travel. But now they’ve just gone silent on this existential threat of the 21st century. We’re being conned.

Partial Transcript: 

Rachel Campos-Duffy: Even the Washington Post has taken notice, saying the split-screen approach suggests that Democrats see talking about the environment as a lose-lose proposition. Here to discuss is Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano. Marc, it is really interesting she cast the deciding vote on the Big Green New Deal, or some call it a scam, and she should be bragging about it, and no one’s talking about this issue. Why, what’s happened?

Marc Morano: This is this is the biggest con I’ve seen in modern politics. Kamala Harris in 2019 was the co-sponsor of The Green New Deal — the AOC original Green New Deal, and as you mentioned, Harris cast a breaking vote in 2022 for the Inflation Reduction Act. Climate is supposed to be an existential threat. Climate is supposed to be in crisis —  an emergency. The Biden-Harris Administration was talking openly — as The Washington Post and Associated Press reported — declaring a National Climate emergency — and all of a sudden, summer of 2024, everything went silent. And why is that? Because according to the Washington Post, the New York Times, they have found in focus groups, they have found in polling, they have found this across the board — that there’s just no concern over climate change in America. It’s dropped even in these polls by the mainstream media, out of the top 20 issues, it’s not even in the top half, and so what’s happened is they’ve just moved on, and they’re framing it now, according to the New York Times, as an issue of ‘freedom’ —  climate ‘solutions’ will bring ‘freedom.’ This is after they talked about banning gas-powered cars, restricting meat eating, banning gas stoves and thermostat controls, and CNN promoting ‘carbon passports’ for travel. But now they’ve just gone silent on this existential threat of the 21st century. We’re being conned.

Morano: This is a huge opening for Trump. They need to ridicule what Harris has said and done. Remember, she was the one who said climate change was the root cause of immigration on the southern border, and she actually went down to investigate. They can’t let her get away with this.

Gov. Tim Walls, by the way, is the exact same way. He was actually —  going back a decade — trying the same tactic of avoiding climate change by telling Minnesotans to support then Pres. Obama’s climate bills because ‘we would all be rich from it’ — they’re all emphasizing this fake government-supported green jobs so-called, and they’re getting labor unions involved and the ideas we’re going to subsidize through trillions of dollars. Remember, the Inflation Reduction Act was only a couple hundred billion dollars, but now the latest estimates are without Congressional authorization of spending of over $1 trillion and rising. So this money is being pumped in. That’s how they’re trying to sell climate change now,  as some kind of cash scam for people to get rich off of.  No longer do we face the tipping point 12 years or the existential threat. They know the public’s not buying that scientific claptrap.

Morano: 2030 was AOC’s climate tipping point deadline, and the clock is ticking, but usually, when it expires, they cross it out and put a new date.

Rachel Campos-Duffy: Tick-tock, tick-tock. Thank you, Marc. So great to have you on.

Morano: Thank you, Rachel. Appreciate it.

RELATED ARTICLES:

NYT: ‘Harris Goes Light on Climate Policy. Green Leaders Are OK With That’ – ‘If she takes a strong position on climate…it will make her look too progressive’

Harris-Walz push ‘climate silence’! WaPo: ‘Why Democrats are so quiet about climate change right now’ –

Dem ‘Party leaders appear to have calculated that climate silence is the safest strategy’ as ‘most voters rank other issues as more important’

‘Third Rail’: Here’s Why Team Kamala Isn’t Peddling The Typical Dem Climate Panic This Election – Morano: ‘No one is buying their ‘climate emergency’ claptrap anymore’

Shhhh. Despite climate silence, Harris Planning ‘Bold Action’ on Climate Change, Adviser Says

Kamala Harris Barely Mentioned Climate at the DNC

Harris, Walz frame climate change in context of ‘freedom’ as only ‘glancing references to climate’ made by Harris & Walz – ‘Climate was muted’

Watch: Interior Sec. Deb Haaland says Kamala Harris will ‘fight climate change’ in speech to DNC

Climate is missing from climate groups’ $55 million ad splurge! – Part of new ‘strategy from Democrats & allies’ –

Ads ‘don’t mention climate change or global warming’

Harris & Walz Are ‘Climate Champions’ Says Former Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy

Harris’ VP Pick Walz Has Pushed Green Energy Mandates More Aggressive Than Gavin Newsom’s – ‘Walz signed over 40 climate-related initiatives into law’

©2024. Marc Morano from Climate Depot. All rights reserved.

‘Statistics Don’t Lie,’ But … 3 Principles that Illuminate the Massive Downward Revision in U.S. Jobs

/in , , , , , , /by

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) this week announced the largest negative revision to their employment estimates in at least 15 years. After initially estimating the U.S. economy added 2.9 million jobs between March 2023 and March 2024, they now estimate the number at closer to 2.1 million, a difference of 818,000 jobs. This means their initial estimate was off by 28% — a huge miscalculation, at least for anyone but a meteorologist. If a dentist were off by so much, he would stab his client in the eye.

While it’s not clear how the estimate could be so inaccurate, it’s more important to consider our response. The announcement triggered a predictable barrage of finger-pointing in all directions from public figures. Equally implausible accusations came from former President Donald Trump and Biden administration Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Both are likely engaged in electoral posturing.

Trump declared that “the Harris-Biden Administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics.” It’s possible, of course, for political concerns to influence federal bureaucrats — even statisticians — so that they manipulate the data to serve a political agenda. But the implausibility of this claim lies in the actor behind the passive verb, “has been caught.” The BLS published the initial jobs estimate, and the BLS revised them. In effect, Trump is asking his audience to believe that the same people who were “fraudulently manipulating” statistics for political gain caught and exposed their own scam and did so weeks before the election. Without a compelling explanation for such a total about-face, this interpretation simply does not fit all the facts.

Equally implausibly, Raimondo suggested in an interview that the revised numbers had been fabricated by Trump. She responded to Trump’s accusations, “I don’t believe it, because I’ve never heard Trump say anything truthful.” Raimondo either was ignorant of, or feigned ignorance of, the contents of the scheduled BLS update, which had been released hours earlier. Despite the narrative crafted at the DNC, the Biden-Harris administration currently possesses the levers of power, while former President Trump has no power at all over the BLS number crunchers.

Politicians are not the only ones susceptible to bad takes on unwelcome economic news. The dramatic revision could also trigger ordinary citizens to feel gloomy or angry, or even erode what remaining trust they have in governmental institutions.

Lest we succumb to such temptations, it is wise to calibrate our expectations of job growth statistics (and other types of statistics) with a look at the big picture. You may have heard the saying, “Statistics don’t lie, but people do.” While this is true, I don’t think it helps to explain what happened here. Instead, I offer three other principles, in a related vein, which readers can apply to the U.S. jobs report estimate, as well as any other statistics they encounter.

1. Statistics Don’t Lie, but They’re Educated Guesses

Many figures that are tossed around in public discourse as concrete facts are not as solid as they seem. Economic snapshots, public opinion surveys, and exit polls all rely on statistics, a branch of mathematics that calculates probabilities and deals with very large numbers. Nearly everything in the social sciences relies on statistics, not hard numbers, to make inferences about the whole from a part (ideally a representative part).

Measuring a whole population is called a census; for large populations (like a whole nation), this is such a monumental and costly undertaking that our federal government only conducts it once a decade for the essential purpose of accurately determining the proper apportionment of congressional districts. Unless they have conducted a census, statisticians are always working with probabilities.

The more complex the issue, the more guesswork is involved. To derive any but the most basic information, social scientists must not only rely on probabilities but also make assumptions in order to interpret the data correctly. These assumptions often involve using something measurable but uninteresting as a “proxy” measurement for something interesting but unmeasurable (e.g. using DUI convictions as a proxy for the prevalence of drunk driving). If those assumptions are inaccurate, then the results based on them will be unreliable.

Tasks such as calculating the total number of jobs added in the U.S. over a 12-month period is an incredibly complex process. To do so, BLS economists must process thousands of data points and use that information to make inferences about millions of jobs. This is about as challenging as a blindfolded football announcer trying to provide live commentary on the game based on sound alone.

The BLS recognizes the limitations inherent to this task. Their initial calculation is called an “estimate.” Their standard practice is to issue a later “revision” to this estimate in February of the next year, and a “preliminary estimate” of that revision in August. This is because information that arrives later can help them to correct their earlier interpretation. The blindfolded announcer could do the same; “there must have been a turnover, because the plays are now progressing in the opposite direction.”

Most BLS revisions of job data are small, while the most recent was surprisingly large. This doesn’t mean that BLS economists suddenly forgot how to do their job. Rather, it means they finally got new information that contradicted previous information, allowing them to correct and refine the assumptions on which they make their calculations. The same is true with public opinion polls; just because some polls are wrong doesn’t mean the method is unreliable. A good pollster will do what the BLS has done and use later information to correct for earlier mistakes.

2. Statistics Don’t Lie, but They Don’t Tell the Whole Story

The Biden White House released a statement on June 28, 2023, claiming, “Bidenomics is already delivering for the American people. Our economy has added more than 13 million jobs ….” Their logic ran: job creation is a sign of a healthy economy, and jobs are being created, so the economy is healthy.

Yet the American people largely met the boasts about Bidenomics with skepticism and ambivalence. American families were still struggling with a prolonged period of high inflation and high interest rates. The number of jobs created did not tell the whole story — or even the primary story — about how the state of the economy affected most Americans.

Even if true, the simple statistic — 13 million jobs created — does not even tell the whole story about job creation. Many of those reappeared as the economy bounced back from the COVID pandemic lockdowns in 2020. Of the jobs that were created, many did not benefit American citizens; the BLS estimated that all job growth from February 2023 to February 2024 went to non-U.S.-born workers, while U.S.-born workers decreased by 741,000.

This is related to the saying, “statistics don’t lie, but people do.” One way people use true statistics to advance a false narrative is by telling only part of the story. However good the play-by-play announcer is — blindfold or no blindfold — he can’t tell about how this player powered through an injury during training, or that player overcame a difficult childhood, because those parts of the story simply aren’t visible on the field.

3. Statistics Don’t Lie, but They Aren’t Ultimate

A third caution about statistics is that they do not tell us about what is most important. Economic figures rise and fall. Opinion polls swing. Even elections are won and lost. Those who are elated by good news will be dejected by bad news. Win or lose, it will all dissipate like a frosty breath. “There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after” (Ecclesiastes 1:11).

The best things in life cannot be measured or statistically analyzed. Even if we try to find proxy values for family, happiness, or spiritual discipline, we can barely scratch the surface of their meaning.

The best knowledge is found in God’s Word, and the best wisdom is found in a lifelong pursuit of the fear of the Lord. What Paul says of physical knowledge applies to physical insight as well, “while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:8).

Today may show a shocking downward revision of job numbers. Tomorrow they may be revised upward. Today your favored candidate may be leading or trailing, and tomorrow the electoral fortunes may be reversed. But “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), and how we stand before him is far more important than what the statistics say.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Poll: Over 70% of Dems and Independents Unaware of Harris’s Controversial Policy Positions

/in , , , , , , , , , , , , /by

A new poll has revealed that almost three-quarters of registered Democrats and Independents are not aware of numerous intensely controversial policy positions that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has taken. The news comes as the founder of a Harris super PAC admitted that internal polling is showing a much tighter race between the vice president and Donald Trump than what recent public poll results suggest.

The poll, conducted by the Media Research Center (MRC), surveyed 800 Democrats and 400 Independents who said they voted for Joe Biden in 2020. It found that at least 70% or more were not aware of positions the vice president has taken that are widely considered to be extremely left-wing, including supporting the elimination of private health insurance, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and decriminalizing crossing the border illegally. In addition, 75% said they did not know Harris was named the most liberal U.S. senator in 2019, and 72% did not know she had “never visited a conflict zone on the border as Border Czar.”

Curtis Houck, managing editor of MRC’s NewsBusters, called the results of the poll “stunning” during Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.” “Of the 10 things that we polled, they were no lower than 71% unaware,” he explained. “Seventy-one percent of her voters are unaware that she has flirted with defunding the police, and thought we should talk about reparations. Seventy-three percent did not know that she’s in favor of the Green New Deal.”

Houck continued, “In 2020, she encouraged supporters to donate to the Minneapolis Bail Fund to release violent criminals who rioted and destroyed those city streets after what happened with George Floyd [78% were unaware of this]. [It] goes all the way up to 86% of her voters did not know that at a CNN town hall, [she stated that] we should have a conversation about death row inmates being allowed to vote. So no matter how you slice it, no matter what issue, whether it’s the economy, the environment, crime, the border, her voters do not know what she believes in, and the fact that they’re still willing to vote for her anyway is a really dangerous commentary on the state of our politics.”

Houck went on to point to another MRC study showing a massive imbalance in the type of coverage the legacy media is giving Harris and Trump in the four weeks since President Joe Biden exited the race.

“[T]he media have given Kamala Harris 84% positive coverage [versus 89% negative coverage of Trump] on ABC, CBS, and NBC, and on the evening shows only twice mentioned her party ideology, mentioned her as a progressive,” he observed. “… There’s always some sort of label affixed to [Republicans], but they haven’t even done that for Kamala Harris. So if they’re not willing to talk about the party label, they’re not going to talk about her policies.”

Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Monday that Harris’s campaign backers are worried over the results of internal polls that do not reflect recent public poll numbers showing Harris opening up a lead over Trump. During an event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, Chauncey McLean, president of the Harris super political action committee (PAC) Future Forward, remarked, “Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public.”

McLean, whose Future Forward PAC has “at least $250 million left to spend” on “a wave of advertising from digital to television,” stated that his group’s analysis has identified Pennsylvania as the most important state for Harris to win, which he anticipated will be a “coin flip.” He also cautioned that the vice president “has yet to fully rebuild the Biden coalition of Blacks, Hispanics and young voters that brought him the White House in 2020.” The race is going to be as “tight as a tick, and pretty much across the board,” he predicted.

Matt Carpenter, director of Family Research Council Action, further underscored that mainstream polling results, particularly within swing states, should be taken with a grain of salt.

“It’s not just McClean who is quietly raising concerns about the state of the Harris-Walz ticket,” he told The Washington Stand. “Former Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod also recently said he’s aware of polling which shows the battleground state matchups are far less favorable to the Democratic nominee than many of the big public polling operations are showing, and even suggested if the election were held today that Trump would win. So much of politics is about managing expectations, and if the Harris-Walz campaign is all polling hype, then they aren’t doing themselves any favors in hiding the true state of the race.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Brutal Venezuelan gang violence spills into quiet suburb from the sanctuary city next door— despite efforts to keep migrants out

American Voters Don’t Like Dems’ Plans to Reshape SCOTUS

Court Rules in Favor of Christian Teacher Forced to Use Trans Pronouns

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

LGBT Group Walz Founded Wants to Trans Kids, Defund Police, and Abolish Borders

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has boasted of founding the local chapter of an organization that demands the “abolition of the police, abolition of borders,” “reparations for all indigenous and black peoples,” placing males in female correctional institutions, and transgender procedures for minors without parental consent — all while concealing children’s transgender identity from their parents. An LGBTQ website has said Walz’s behavior toward his students would get him labeled a “groomer” today. Walz’s wife, Gwen, is equally supportive of indoctrinating children in this group’s agenda, because she considers it part of her religious faith that “God created … some people gay.”

Tim Walz founded the local chapter of the GSA Network at Mankato West High School in the late 1990s. Numerous delegates highlighted Walz’s connection to the organization as he prepared to speak on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“I want to hear from the man who stepped up to create the Gay-Straight Alliance in the late ‘90s — the coach who stood up for the kids who needed him,” a teary-eyed Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid early Wednesday evening. In a video that night, the Minnesota governor’s wife, Gwen Walz boasted, “When one of our students started the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, Tim agreed to serve as faculty adviser, because he knew how impactful it would be to have a football coach involved.”

Both called the group by its former name, the “Gay-Straight Alliance.” But the organization renamed itself the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network (GSA Network) in 2015 to prove that its 4,000 affiliates “have moved beyond the labels of gay and straight, and the limits of a binary gender system.” (The Mankato West chapter has also changed its name.)

The GSA Network codified its political beliefs in a document on its resources page titled “Truth Nine Point Platform.” The platform calls for “the Abolition of the Police,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “Borders and the Judicial System”; “an End of the Cisgender Heterosexual Patriarchy”; “Reparations for all Indigenous and Black Peoples,” including “Indigenous reclamation of stolen lands”; and “free and non-compulsory education for all ages.”

“We demand abolition! Abolition of the police, abolition of borders and ICE, abolition of the current punishment-based justice system. [sic.] We demand for our communities to be empowered to take care of themselves, for no borders, for rehabilitation and healing justice,” the manifesto declares.

The diminutive revolutionary screed claims that it “builds upon the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program,” although the FBI has confirmed that the Black Panther Party “advocated the use of violence and guerilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government.”

“We are in a moment which calls for us to bravely and ferociously fight for our communal liberation,” which will be launched “in the name of our transgender and gender nonconforming ancestors who struggled before us,” proclaims the GSA Network’s document. “The revolution is a relationship.”

The Walz family signaled its solidarity with the George Floyd/BLM riots, which touched off in Minnesota in May 2020. Gwen Walz said she inhaled the smell of burning tires through her open window in order to feel close to the revolutionary BLM movement. Whistleblowers say Tim Walz ordered police to abandon the third precinct to arsonists, whom Kamala Harris urged her followers to bail out of jail.

The organization’s revolutionary platform, adopted in 2018, is anything but a dead letter: The GSA Network referred to “our TRUTH Nine-Point Platform” last November (specifically, its call for reparations) and quoted the manifesto in its most recent press release in March. (The November press release also demanded U.S. taxpayers furnish “aid to Gaza” and decries “the ongoing colonization and cultural genocide of black and brown peoples.”)

The GSA Network’s Extreme Transgender Agenda

The GSA Network believes in promoting transgender ideology and facilitating children’s transgender “transitions” with or without parental consent. “Know the laws in your state around students’ privacy rights and what you do and don’t have to tell parents/ guardians/families. This is important so you don’t inadvertently out a student as a member of the GSA,” states the GSA Advisor Handbook, aimed at public school teachers like Walz. “When calling youth, it may not be safe to mention ‘GSA club’ or another trans or queer reference.”

The Nine-Point Platform also states “trans youth” should have “self-determination” over “all aspects of our lives.” The GSA Network slammed state laws that protect children from the predatory transgender industry. Laws against “providing gender-affirming healthcare to trans youth … effectively deny trans youth basic human rights and dignity,” claimed GSA in 2020.

At the local level, Mankato West High School’s GSA chapter walked out of class in April 2022 to protest Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, which says teachers should not “encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” before the fourth grade.

The GSA Network also believes in placing teenage boys who say they identify as transgender in female juvenile detention facilities. In a 2017 report co-authored by the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, the GSA Network complained, “LGBTQ youth are frequently placed in facilities according to the sex on their birth certificate or based on their genitalia. … [T]ransgender youth should be housed based on the gender identity they express rather than based on anatomical sex or the sex on their birth certificate.”

Tim Walz has put many of the GSA Network’s political priorities into action as governor of Minnesota. He signed a bill (House File 146) that would take minors into state emergency custody if the child has been “unable to obtain gender-affirming health care” because his parents objected, as well as banning compassionate therapeutic care for people suffering from unwanted transgender feelings. The roots of these policies date back to Walz’s days as a teacher.

Walz’s Action Would Get You Called a ‘Groomer’: LGBT Website

Walz has said publicly that Mankato students came to him about founding a GSA chapter — but his advocacy of the LGBT agenda predates his time at Mankato West High School. While teaching at a high school in Nebraska in the early 1990s, Tim and Gwen Walz took a student who identified as homosexual to a concert by the Indigo Girls, an openly lesbian folk rock group.

The LGBTQ website Them stated that, today, the Walzes’ behavior would be “liable to get you called a ‘groomer.’”

In 1997, two years before the founder of Mankato West’s GSA chapter ever thought of the idea, Gwen Walz announced “out of the blue” on the first day of her 10th grade English class that it would be “a safe space for gay and lesbian students,” according to former student Jacob Reitan. He reportedly told Mrs. Walz about his sexual preference before he told his own parents.

Tim Walz also encouraged children to have frank discussions about adult subject matter at school. One of Walz’s former students, 2004 graduate Seth Elliot Meyer, remembered that Walz “wanted me to be OK with who I was” by embracing a bisexual identity as an impressionable teenager. Another of Walz’s former pupils — Micah Kronlokken, who described himself as “a young, closeted, queer kid” when Walz coached him in the seventh grade — said Tim Walz believed that teenagers should be “treated a little more like adults and trusted to have tricky conversations, and that high school is a microcosm for our world at large.”

Walz later confessed, “To create a culture in a school that was welcoming, open, and understanding” of the LGBTQ movement and its aims “was something that Gwen and I always strove for.”

“Both Tim and Gwen were incredibly supportive of their gay students,” said Reitan, who is now a lawyer and LGBTQ activist. Walz “showed the bully a better path forward, and I can think of no one better than Tim Walz to show that better path forward for America.”

Walz did not defend these policies during his debut on the national stage Wednesday night. Instead, the Harris-Walz campaign appears to be relying on media tropes that brand their political enemies as intolerant hatemongers. In the DNC video, Walz’s former student Noah Hobbs said Walz “stands up to bullies,” repeating the common LGBTQ activist tactic of bullying people of faith, who do not celebrate extreme transgender ideology or sinful sexual relationships, as “bullies.”

Walz has used the same language throughout his political career. While running for governor, Walz asserted that he — as “an older, white, straight, married football coach” — could assure “that there’s no bullying.” During his 2023 his State of the State address, Walz alleged that Republicans “want to put bullies in charge of your health care,” while he would “put bullies in their place. And that’s why we protected access to gender-affirming health care.”

Walz, who has been accused of opportunism, may believe his association with the GSA Network boosts his standing with the Democratic Party’s left-wing base. In a 2018 campaign ad for governor, Walz cited his founding of his school’s GSA chapter as proof that he “can actually deliver on those progressive promises,” because he had “done it in the past.”

Walz’s ties to GSA would send a more concerning signal to the parents of children suffering from Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). Yaeli Martinez first encountered transgender ideology at an LGBTQ high school club. In time, she began to identify as a boy named “Andrew” and ran away from home. Upon learning that her mother, Abigail Martinez, did not support her gender transition, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services put the underage Yaeli into a group home. In 2019, Yaeli committed suicide by stepping in front of a moving train. (Her heartbreaking story is illustrated in the movie “Gender Transformations: The Untold Realities,” an original production of The Epoch Times.)

The Walz Family: ‘God Creates People … Gay or Straight’

Stories such as these, or those of other detransitioners left with the scars of poor adolescent decisions facilitated by adults, seem unlikely to sway Tim Walz and his wife, who appear to have a religious devotion to LGBT ideology.

“For Ms. Walz, being an ally for gay students was a matter of living up to the tenets of her Christian faith,” reported The New York Times. A spokeswoman for Gwen Walz, Claire Lancaster, told the newspaper that Mrs. Walz holds a “strong belief that God creates people in the way they are supposed to be, whether that is gay or straight.” President Joe Biden has expressed similar sentiments.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has described Tim Walz as “steeped in the Catholic social justice traditions of his parents.” However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that sodomy is a grave sin that can never be approved:

“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

If Tim Walz rejects the Roman Catholic Church’s binding doctrine on faith and morals, he is also out of step with U.S. voters. Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump contrasted Walz’s extreme views with the mainstream of the American electorate. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” said Trump. “He’s very heavy into transgender — anything transgender he thinks is great.”

“He’s not where the country is on anything,” Trump concluded.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

American Voters Don’t Like Dems’ Plans to Reshape SCOTUS

Court Rules in Favor of Christian Teacher Forced to Use Trans Pronouns

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.