The Democrats let President Joe Biden back into the wild this week after he disappeared during the Democratic National Convention, hid in California and then napped on the beach in Delaware. It was a nearly three-week absence, and his latest appearance in a key swing state proves why they’re happy to have him missing in action.
During an event in Wisconsin, Biden finally admitted that the “Inflation Reduction Act” was deceptively named and didn’t actually reduce inflation. In fact, it increased prices through excess spending and was a giant, corrupt handout to the so-called “green” energy industry. It’s why I’ve always called the legislation the Inflation Induction Act.
"We should have named it what it was,” Biden said, rambling on about the “successes” of his “green” agenda through the legislation.
As one example, the Inflation Induction Act took billions in hard-earned American tax dollars. Its supporters, solely Democrats and unelected government bureaucrats, claimed that money would fund 500,000 new electric charging stations across the country by 2030. So far, they’ve spent $7.5 billion and have built eight chargers.
It’s a total scam and always has been.
From its introduction in 2022, critics of the legislation pointed out the bill would increase costs and was basically the Green New Deal under a different name.
“The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the most significant climate legislation in United States history. Energy Innovation Policy and Technology LLC® modeling finds the IRA’s $370 billion in climate and clean energy investments could cut U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions up to 43% below 2005 levels by 2030,” Forbes reported at the time. “Though the clean energy transition is happening, coal retirements must be accelerated to reach our climate goals.”
So why does this matter now? Inflation wreaked havoc on American families (and still is), wiping out savings, skyrocketing credit card debt and making the dream of homeownership impossible with out-of-control interest rates. The passage of the Inflation Induction Act wasn’t bipartisan and wasn’t overwhelming. On Capitol Hill, the votes for the legislation were tied and Vice President Kamala Harris – also the President of the U.S. Senate – cast the tie-breaking vote to get the legislation over the finish line.
“I was proud to cast the tie-breaking vote to pass our Inflation Reduction Act,” Harris posted on X in March 2024.
To mark the two-year anniversary of the monstrosity, Harris boasted about the spending on “climate.”
“Our Inflation Reduction Act is also the single largest climate investment in American history,” she said in a joint statement with Biden.
As Americans continue to struggle with the U.S. entering a recession, which the country has arguably been in since summer 2023, Harris should be held accountable for defrauding the public.
Harris’s secret weapon, meanwhile, could be humor.
Neither Clinton nor Biden used wit against Trump in debates, and it was a missed opportunity.
For six weeks, Vice President Harris’s campaign has been running circles around President Trump’s efforts. Democrats have raised tons of money, energized their base, and protected Ms. Harris from unscripted interviews and political risks. All the while, Trump’s campaigning has been lackluster.
True, Trump has been through a lot over this past year — indictments, trials, contested primaries, and an attempted assassination; the strain is showing. Yet the time has come for him to make the sale.
Despite Trump’s lack of focus and Ms. Harris’s early momentum, polls continue to show a close race. This is why Tuesday’s presidential debate is so important. It could make or break either campaign.
As we’ve learned over the years, debates are more often lost than won. The Biden-Trump showdown in June proved it.
For Trump, the debate is an opportunity to recharge, a chance to unveil a strong, disciplined message. For Ms. Harris, it’s an opportunity to broaden her base and reassure skeptical voters.
Pundits tell us, incorrectly, that voters have already made up their minds, but the truth is otherwise. Recent polling finds that a sizable part of the electorate — 18 percent — could still swing either way.
Right out of the box, each candidate should lay the predicate for the entire night. Starting aggressively is the best way to take the offense, regardless of questions asked or time limits.
Debate messaging should reflect the campaign’s central theme — assuming a campaign has one. Trump’s central theme has yet to be honed, so the debate is an opportunity for him to do so.
Ms. Harris’s messaging has been working well, but it’s hollow, mostly a collection of slogans. This debate is a chance for her to tie her themes together.
The first words out of Trump’s mouth should frame the election as a choice between his record and the Biden-Harris record. Polls tell us that most voters prefer the Trump record, especially on the economy, immigration, and national security. This could be Trump’s version of President Reagan’s famous debate line, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
Trump also needs to make the case that Ms. Harris is too far left by citing specific policies she’s supported. He should end a line of rapid-fire attacks with a pithy summation, something like: “Biden went along with the progressive left, but Harris will be their champion.”
Ms. Harris’s first words should focus on the future, reinforcing her message that “we’re not going back” to the Trump era. From the start, she needs to inoculate herself against likely attacks; that will make it easier to respond when they arise.
She will have to be ready to defend her own views — from Gaza to Ukraine, taxes to fracking, grocery prices to deficit spending. Ms. Harris needs to show a depth of knowledge she rarely displays.
At times, the most important thing Trump should do is shut up. Time limits and microphone mute buttons may help him do that. He needs to avoid distractions, such as relitigating the 2020 election.
There is no reason for him to bring up his criminal cases. These are potential traps; Ms. Harris will have ready-made retorts for all of them.
Unpredictability is Trump’s strength. Ms. Harris expects him to be rambling and disruptive. Only if, instead, he’s rational and concise, and his attacks are coherent and focused — not his usual word salad of overstatements and distractions — he could force Ms. Harris off her game.
Ms. Harris should employ two techniques that could throw Trump off stride. One is humor. Neither Senator Clinton nor President Biden effectively used wit against Trump in previous debates, and it was a missed opportunity.
The second is for Ms. Harris to make her points in the form of questions. As a lawyer and senator, she knows how to do this. Even though debate rules don’t allow cross-questioning, nothing prohibits candidates from posing questions to the audience in the form of statements.
After the endless ads and unremitting smears that often cancel out one another, debates serve as tiebreakers for undecided voters. This may be the only presidential debate left in this election. A bad night for either candidate could be fatal.
Tune in on Tuesday and decide for yourself.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Kamala Harris has “vowed to lower prices at the grocery store with price controls and open up the increasingly out-of-reach housing market with tax subsidies for homebuyers.” Harris asserts that she “will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food. Her plan will include new penalties for opportunistic companies that exploit crises and break the rules.”
As a result, Donald Trump said that Harris has gone “full communist.”
But what does “full communist” even mean to generations of young people who have no idea what communism has wrought in the world?
At the American Institute for Economic Research a reader learns that:
Most people in [communist] Cuba are skipping meals [.] These shortages of food are intimately linked with socialist governments, related economic policies, and, in particular, price controls.
Price controls are huge red flags. These are not red flags celebrating socialism. Price control’s reddest flags relate to the nature of exchange, morality, and freedom [emphasis mine].Price controls increase poverty and hunger. Contrary to the utopian dreams of policymakers, price controls distort market activity in perverse ways.
And they always lead to shortages.
Recently, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson commissioned a study looking into creating grocery stores operated by the city of Chicago. The move “by Mayor Johnson is a step to implement a communist system where the city or state owns the production and distribution of food, which history shows us [always ends] disastrously.”
As goes Cuba -- so goes America?
Furthermore, “Grocers aren’t price gouging consumers. They’re struggling to survive.
[Moreover] it’s not only the farmers who are suffering. It’s the truckers -- it’s the transporters -- it’s the people who bring the stuff into the store.”
Harris’ “fix” would “bring devastating consequences on the entire nation by crippling the desire to produce, which in turn will only bring higher prices and empty shelves.”
Other Harris/Walz ideas include: “…a push to build three million new housing units to fight the housing crisis, $25,000 in taxpayer money to provide down-payment support to first time homebuyers, and a plan to expand the child tax credit.”
These ideas will only drive up inflation.
Ayn Rand in an essay in the Readers Digest of January 1944 explains that “[t]otalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group -- whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good.’”
In 1960 Richard M. Nixon, then Vice President of the United States wrote that:
Communism will supplant and destroy the market economy of capitalism.
The production and distribution of goods [would be] put under central direction, the theory being that the flow of goods would be directed by social need without reference to principles of profit and loss. The other obstacle to the realization of a free market lies in the simple fact that the government owns the whole of industry [emphasis mine].
California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown had deep communist ties. He appointed Harris to key positions. Brown is widely ‘regarded as one of the Chinese Communist Party’s best friends in the Bay Area.’
Harris argued an amicus brief in 2008 that the ‘Second Amendment does not protect an individual’s right to own a gun.’
In early 2013, Harris… urged President Barack Obama to award, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the late Fred Ross Sr., a Saul Alinsky-trained radical [.]
Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, was a partner from 2017-2020 with the law firm DLA Piper, which... ‘boasts nearly 30 years of experience in China and over 140 lawyers dedicated to its ‘China Investment Services’ branch.’ The company employs a host of former Chinese Communist Party officials.
taught history and English to teenage students in China. The program was paid for by the Chinese government, and was made possible by a friend of Walz in China’s Foreign Affairs Department. Walz began this endeavor just months after the Communist Chinese government had slaughtered hundreds to thousands of pro-democracy protesters in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
In a letter he wrote as governor of Minnesota, Walz boasted that his state ‘has promoted Minnesota’s connections with China and hosted numerous senior Chinese leaders for decades.’
During an August 12, 2024 appearance on the Breitbart News Daily podcast, bestselling author Peter Schweizer stated that Walz remained connected to the Chinese government through ‘secret police stations that the Chinese have here in the United States,’ to intimidate Chinese expatriates living in the U.S. who are critical of the CCP. Schweizer then cited one alleged CCP police station that was ‘tied to a group called Minnesota Global, which is a Tim Walz organization.’
History has repeatedly shown that “… [t]he premises of Communist philosophy make any coherent theory of freedom impossible [.]”
And, in fact, the Democrats are targeting the Constitution’s guardrails in every realm.
Walz and Harris’ beliefs are reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Bolshevism, in its various incarnations, collapsed in Europe, yet it is alive in China, Cuba, and a few other places. Maoism is the Chinese version of Leninism, and its recognition of market mechanisms does not diminish the totalitarian features of the system: one-party dictatorship, ubiquitous propaganda, censorship, secret police, a cult of personality, and the persecution of dissidents.
The lie is the eternal soul of communism.
Moreover, at the Democratic National Convention, the Bill of Rights was denigrated with a call to re-imagine democracy.
As Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn said: “To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly go about carrying them out.”
‘The injustices of communism were not limited to mass murder alone. Even those fortunate enough to survive still were subjected to severe repression, including violations of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, loss of property rights, and the criminalization of ordinary economic activity.
The Democratic Party’s stance on gun control should be a warning signal to all Americans.
The Turkic people in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region have for years been persecuted, imprisoned and disappeared by the CCP.
For Ziba Murat, the agony of awaiting any news about her mother remains relentless, despite the passing of time. Gulshan Abbas, a retired doctor in her native Xinjiang region of northwestern China, vanished on September 10, 2018.
“We have no information on why she’s detained or how she’s doing. We have not made significant progress, but we may know her possible location,” Ms. Murat, who was living in America, told The New York Sun. “People are too afraid even to say her name, referring to her only as ‘she’ or ‘your daughter’s grandma.’”
Still, Ms. Murat cannot understand why anyone would target her mother, whom she depicts as a “gentle woman” who became a medical professional with the noble goal of helping others in need.
Sadly, her chilling story is hardly an anomaly. The Uyghurs — a Turkic people in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region — have for years been intensely persecuted, imprisoned and disappeared by the Chinese Communist Party. Precise figures remain elusive, but reports indicate that upwards of 3 million Uyghurs have been forcibly confined in internment camps since 2017.
Dismissed by Beijing as “vocational training centers,” these facilities are widely condemned as cultural and religious suppression instruments. The extent of the ongoing human rights crisis in the vast autonomous region in northwest China, known as Xinjiang or East Turkestan, to the Uyghur community.
“In addition to the 1.8 million or more Uyghurs held in the camps, 3 million or more Uyghurs subject to forced labor, and the systematic attempts to erase the next generation of Uyghurs through forced abortions and forced sterilization, the CCP is attacking Uyghur families at the root,” a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, Olivia Enos, told the Sun.
“Children are separated from their parents when their mothers and fathers are sent to the camps or sent to other parts of China to labor. They are also subject to forced indoctrination through so-called live-in kindergartens where dreams of their future are being replaced with required loyalty to the CCP.”
Minister for foreign affairs and security for the East Turkistan government in exile, Salih Hudayar, asserted that, in addition to the slave-like condition in camps and the forced sterilization of women, “some 4 million Uyghur babies have been forcibly aborted since 1989.”
For years, harrowing testimony from refugees and damning reports from human rights organizations have consistently exposed a pattern of abuses on a vast scale in the region. Some in the international community, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have unequivocally condemned the severe human rights abuses in Xinjiang as crimes against humanity.
A more severe assessment has been made by more than 15 countries, including America, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and France, which have formally labeled these atrocities as genocide.
While much of the West has taken a firm and vocal stance against the Beijing-led horrors targeting the Muslim minority, none of the countries condemning such actions are from the Muslim world. On the contrary, many such countries have actively defended China against accusations of Muslim-minority abuse.
“Leaders in the Middle East have calculated that defending the Muslim minority is not worth the risk of losing Chinese economic, political, and military assistance,” an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Haisam Hassanein, told the Sun. “For them, China is too big to challenge.”
China is home to about 22 million Muslims, making up 1.6 percent of the population, with Uyghurs being the most prominent. Despite a history of Islamic presence since the 7th century and recognition of the Uyghur identity as distinct from the Han majority, tensions have persisted due to Uyghur separatism and resistance against Chinese rule, culminating in ethnic riots in 2009. Since then, China has intensified restrictions on Uyghurs.
However, the international heat started to mount in the summer of 2019 when America and several countries, most of them European, signed a letter to the UN’s Human Rights Council conveying concern about the “large-scale places of detention, as well as widespread surveillance and restrictions.”
Not only did ambassadors from 37 countries, including many notable Muslim Arab and African nations including Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Algeria and UAE, decline to support the calls for a probe, but actively went against it — issuing their own joint letter in support of China’s horrendous policies toward the Uyghur community.
Earlier that same year, Turkey differentiated itself from the pack when it issued a statement criticizing China’s human rights violations against the Uyghurs. Nonetheless, President Erdogan later visited the region and declared that those in Xinjiang were “living happily.” Adding to the gut punch, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation went on to pass a resolution lauding Beijing for “providing care to its Muslim citizens” and has remained unconcerned about Uyghur’s suffering ever since.
Uyghurs, led by ETGE Foreign Minister, Salih Hudayar, protest outside the White House July 28, 2024. Courtesy of the East Turkistan National Movement
A 20-something Uyghur based in Virginia, Arfat Erkin, who dropped out of university studies in America after his family at home disappeared and he could no longer afford the tuition, told The New York Sun that the persecution continues, but it has been driven deeper underground in recent years as Beijing seeks to push back against western-led criticism of its “reeducation camps.”
What the government has been doing “is shutting down the camps and moving” Uyghurs “into prisons or forced labor detainment and trying to legalize and justify what they are doing, he explained. They’ve resorted to criminal charges,” he says. “Some people — like my cousin — were released from the camps, only to be detained and taken to prison a little later.”
Mr. Erkin heard secondhand that his mother, a mathematics teacher, was released after a year in a camp in 2019 due to severely deteriorating health. Yet relatives warned him that he could not have any contact with her out of fear for her safety. His father, a much-loved journalist and producer, was jailed in March 2018. Mr. Erkin has not heard from him since.
“The charges against him and sentence length keep changing. The CCP told the U.N. that he was sentenced to 19 years and ten months under a vague charge of ‘disrupting ethnic harmony,’” he lamented. “But I think it was retaliation for my advocacy.”
In 2022, the U.N. Human Rights Council voted down a Western-led motion to even debate alleged human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. This marked a significant victory for China, marking only the second time a motion has been rejected in the council’s history. The decision is a setback for accountability efforts, Western moral authority on human rights, and the U.N.’s credibility. Countries like Qatar, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan opposed the motion, with some citing concerns about alienating China.
According to experts, the decision to ignore — or condone — the abuses comes down to one fundamental reason: economic interests such as the Belt and Road Initiative are far more important than religion and ideology. These nations know how sensitive Beijing is to criticism and don’t want to upset the Communist Party leadership.
Mr. Hassanein pointed out that the Arab silence is motivated by some other additional factors. In his words, the first is a fear of political Islam – which intensified in the wake of the 2011 uprisings that empowered Islamists and “coincided with a spike in Jihadist terrorism.”
“Since then, Arab leaders became uncomfortable with conflicts built on religious ideology, and this explains why they are sympathetic toward Beijing’s claim that the Uyghur crackdown is a counterterrorism campaign,” Mr. Hassanein explained. “Second, (there is) wariness of separatist movements. China claims the Uyghur issue is a Western conspiracy to create ethnic minority divisions within its borders. Arab states tend to view Kurdish and other minority issues as Western fueled attempts to create internal strife and separatism – and that’s why Arab leaders okay Beijing suppressing any such movements within its borders.”
Yet, for many observers, the hypocrisy is glaring.
After a man tore up a copy of the Quran outside a mosque in Stockholm last June, the likes of Iran, Iraq and Turkey issued strong statements of rebuke, and Morocco even recalled its Ambassador in outrage. That same month, Palestinian President Abbas even met with Xi Jinping and championed his genocidal campaign, criticizing the West as “interfering” in China’s domestic affairs. Mr. Abbas said nothing of the tens of thousands of mosques decimated or damaged in Xinjiang.
Further, when it comes to the plight of the Rohingya Muslims in Buddhist-majority Burma or the fate of the Gazans, the condemnation from the Islamic world is fervent. Even the Vatican, which is typically very vocal about human rights issues and atrocities directed at minorities, has not made any public statements about the Uyghur situation in China.
“The silence of Muslim-majority countries on the Uyghur Genocide can be seen as both hypocritical and unsurprising. Many observers view the silence as hypocritical because these countries often position themselves as defenders of Muslim rights and values on the global stage,” Executive Director at the Center for Uyghur Studies, Abdulhakim Idris, said. “This double standard suggests that economic and political interests are being prioritized over religious solidarity and human rights, revealing a contradiction in their stated values versus their actions.”
Uyghurs protest outside the White House July 28, 2024, commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 2014 Yarkand Massacre. They called for urgent global intervention to end China’s ongoing Uyghur Genocide in East Turkistan. Courtesy of the East Turkistan Government in Exile
But despite the searing silence from many pockets of the planet, both the Trump and Biden administrations have continued to defend the beleaguered minority. In early August, American Customs and Border Protection prohibited imports from five Chinese companies and a manufacturing company alleged to have exploited forced labor from the Uyghur community, bringing to 73 the number of banned companies under the banner of the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Mr. Erkin also cautioned that the CCP has attempted to turn Xinjiang into a “Bollywood Disneyland” tourist attraction of sorts, with people planted to dance in the streets and promote the sensibility of fun and games while millions languish out of sight. Nevertheless, experts insist that more could — and should — be done.
“The U.S. government (must) commit itself to even stronger enforcement of the UFLPA, sanction additional individuals in entities in China responsible for the ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity and extend expedited forms of refugee resettlement through the Priority-2 refugee program for Uyghurs,” Ms. Enos said. “The U.S. government should urge the release of every Uyghur for the CCP’s brutal political reeducation camps and ultimately call for their closure in every meeting with Chinese counterparts.”
In addition, the FDD’s Mr. Hassanein stressed that Washington and other Western capitals could “increase Arab and Muslim country’s awareness of what’s happening in Xinjiang.”
“Their Arabic media channels directed at Arab audiences could raise awareness of this issue and dispel Chinese government claims that the issue is happening because of terrorists,” he surmised. From the purview of Turkistan’s exile, Mr. Hudayar said the genocide designation by America and much of the West remains “largely symbolic.”
“The international community’s failure to hold Chinese officials accountable at the International Criminal Court, especially in contrast to its stance on Ukraine, highlights a troubling double standard,” he pointed out. “The U.S. holds significant diplomatic and economic leverage that can influence Muslim-majority countries to take a stand against China’s atrocities in East Turkistan. Although economic ties with China often deter these nations from speaking out, the U.S. can use economic incentives, diplomatic pressure, and coalition-building to encourage a shift in their positions.”
In the meantime, the crisis grinds on in the shadows.
“I’ve been warned that I should be quiet and accept the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Erkin said. “But I cannot let this happen and say nothing.”
And Ms. Murat, a young mother, says she will not — cannot — give up her fight.
“Recently, the European Union raised (my mother’s) case during their human rights conversation in China and also a few special rapporteurs at the U.N. sent an official joint statement to the Chinese government, asking for more information on the case,” she added. “I am continuing to work closely with the members of the U.S. Congress and U.N. human rights office and working groups to continue to keep the spotlight on her case. It will be six years in September since they took her hostage. I will not stop until we bring her home.”
