The Harris Campaign in Three Acts

posted by William Manning at American Thinker 

Consider that politicians are actors performing to obtain votes from their audience.  Kamala Harris has inadvertently presented her campaign in three acts:

Act I: Honeymoon

Act II: Run Out the Clock

Act III: Panic Ensues

Along the way she made some unforced errors which have proved informative about her candidacy.

Act I, The Honeymoon

After her selection, Harris began cutting into the lead Trump enjoyed against Biden.  Democrats were overjoyed with the new candidate.  She was young, energetic, and  could lead the party into the future.  She had been Attorney General of California, a federal senator, vice-president, and now candidate for president.  Despite her credentials, the pretense developed that she was a blank slate.  Blank seemed to agree with her.

Her strategists understood the country was in no mood to elect an archetypical San Francisco liberal.  She had to shed her anti-fracking, open border, Medicare for all policies to attract moderate voters.  When a reporter asked a question, she smiled politely, waved and removed herself from the questioner as quickly as possible.

During the honeymoon, she made an unforced error.  To placate her base, she refused to attend a joint session of Congress in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the nation.  The Democrats’ liberal base had joined Hamas in antisemitic protests.  Harris deserted her post to appease the protestors and her radical base.  This was a bad decision.  She could have had a photo-op beside the Speaker of the House on the Congressional dais with Netanyahu in the foreground.  She passed on an opportunity to appear as a stateswoman.

The honeymoon continued as an adoring press and several Democrat politicians desiring the running-mate position pursued Harris.  The suitors courted Ms. Harris until she selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Weird was Walz’s operative word, but he contended Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance were the weird ones.  Harris and the media had great fun laughing at “weird” Republicans.  The girl was having fun.  She was on a honeymoon after all.

Voters soon wondered at Walz’s wild-eyed weirdness.  The common thread between Harris and Walz was their commitment to advance liberal movements.  Harris could have selected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.  He was a more moderate, clear-eyed choice who is the popular governor of the largest swing state.  A win in Pennsylvania would likely assure a Harris victory.  She decided that advancing liberal movements was more important than winning an election.  Choosing Walz was a lapse in judgment.

The Democratic National Convention was a well-orchestrated consummation of Harris’s candidacy.  She possessed the progressive bona fides the elite faction demanded and the good sense to pretend she had moderated her views.  She was acceptable to everyone in the hall.  They cheered joyously for her candidacy.  Sadly, the honeymoon was over.  The campaign began in earnest on Labor Day.

Act II, Run Out the Clock

As September started Harris had a lead in the polls, money in the bank, and momentum on her side.  The Harris campaign decided to repeat the Biden basement strategy.  If she read a prepared speech from a teleprompter while smiling joyously, she would win.  Her campaign paraphrased the three wise monkeys—see nothing relevant, do nothing relevant, say nothing relevant.

Harris was also counting on Trump to make errors.  Trump had a very different style and strategy.  The removal of Biden put him a little off his game.  His strategy had focused on the incompetence of Biden juxtaposed with the successful policies he pursued as president.  The people viewed Harris differently than Biden.  She didn’t exhibit symptoms of dementia.

Trump’s task was to connect Harris with the Biden administration.  The open border clearly demonstrated this connection.  She was the Border Czar.  As Attorney General of California, Harris didn’t classify illegal immigration as a crime.  Trump took shots at Harris’s political record and explained why she was unfit for the office she sought.  Many people didn’t feel comfortable voting for a candidate that smiled sweetly and said nothing.  Instead of making errors, Trump was making points.

In a debate on September 10th, Trump pushed Harris on her record while she danced around it.  Harris pushed back on abortion and insisted he was a threat to democracy.  Trump took some of the bait and appeared angry at times.  The debate had no clear winner.

As September ended, Harris’s strategy to run out the clock was failing.  The RealClearPolitics average of national polls showed that Trump had closed the gap and was gaining momentum.  He was doing even better in the swing states.

Act III, Panic Ensues

To combat her drop in the polls, Harris began a series of interviews but continued to say nothing relevant.  She maintained her moderate views but was unconvincing.  Her pat answer about the economy was, “I grew up in amiddle-class family”.  Many Americans grow up in middle-class families.  This doesn’t qualify them to be economic experts or president.  Her biggest mistake occurred on the progressive coffee klatch, The View.  When asked what she would do differently than President Biden she could think of nothing.  This completed Trump’s task of connecting Harris with the poor performance of Biden.

Kamala’s third unforced error was her refusal to attend the Al Smith Dinner on October 17th.  Al Smith was a four-term Democrat Governor of New York and the party’s candidate for president in 1928.  He was also a Catholic.  His memory is honored by the Archdiocese of New York with a fundraising dinner during every presidential campaign.  Harris snubbed Catholic charities and the memory of a famous Democrat.  A few days before the dinner, Gretchen Whitmer mimicked giving Holy Communion by feeding a kneeling woman a Dorito.  Snubbing the Al Smith Dinner was a bad decision.  Whitmer’s sacrilegious musing was unclever.

The Obamas were called on to realign black male voters since polling indicated many of these voters were considering voting for Trump.  Barack told black men they were tempted by Trump because they are misogynists.  Michelle told similar audiences that voting for Trump put females in grave danger.  The Obamas might consider that people of all races are free to think for themselves and vote accordingly.

Harris recently asked Americans to visualize Trump wearing a brown shirt while sporting a tooth-brush mustache and goose-stepping wildly around Mar-a-Lago.  Democrats have portrayed Trump as Hitler, a Russian spy, and criminal mastermind.  They are the child that cries wolf.  Presenting disturbing images of Donald Trump has become a Democrat parlor game.  Attempting to change people’s minds with wild accusations about Trump signals ensuing panic.

The outcome of the election is uncertain.  Trump currently has a lead in the national polls and the swing states.  Democrats will likely lose Senate seats in West Virginia and Montana.  Seats are in play in at least four other states.  Republicans are up a point in generic congressional vote polling.  Of course, on election day all the polls can be thrown out the window.  Hang onto your hat, the evening of November 5th should be interesting.

Rally coverage, And we Know, and more- November 3rd

 

Law Student Faces Expulsion for ‘Aggressive Pointing’ - Not The Babylon Bee

 Title IX laws were created to protect women from discrimination. Now they’re being used to punish acts once seen as ‘completely protected speech.’

When Houston Porter, a 28-year-old law student at Pace University, first walked into the college auditorium last month, he was surprised to see a packed house for the “Saving Women’s Sports” panel he was co-moderating. 

“Our events normally don’t get that kind of turnout,” says Porter, a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative advocacy group that sponsored the panel at Pace’s law school in White Plains, New York. “So it was exciting.”

But not long after, Porter’s world started “crumbling down”—with at least one professor shouting at panelists and another allegedly rushing the stage, followed by a Title IX investigation that accuses him of having “aggressively pointed” at a transgender student and misgendering her. Now Porter faces the possibility of suspension, expulsion, and even being barred from practicing law.

About two dozen students, plus two faculty members, attended the October 15 panel against Proposition 1, a New York ballot measure that promises to codify gender identity and gender expression as protected classes in the state constitution. Porter said most attendees showed up wearing trans pride pins, but he didn’t think anything of it. In fact, he says, his LBGTQ peers were “the exact type of people” he hoped would join the discussion.

Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, NY. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

For the first 45 minutes, the panel—which included a constitutional lawyer and two Republican state senate candidates—was civil, save for a few interruptions, Porter told me.

Then Porter opened the floor to questions and “the room kind of exploded,” he said. “There were a bunch of people in my face.”

Four attendees described to me the scene that unfolded. One called it “chaos”; Pace professor Randolph McLaughlin, who specializes in civil rights law, admitted to me that he shouted at the panelists: “You don’t recognize that trans girls are girls!” Another source told me Professor Margot Julia Pollans rushed the stage and “was yelling” at the panelists. (When reached by The Free Press, Pollans said she “did not” rush the stage or yell at participants.) 

A panelist told me security had to escort them to their car and, according to panel co-moderator David Skjerli, a chair was knocked over in all the “pandemonium.” Amid the madness, Porter said he recalls looking out and seeing acquaintances, classmates, and members of his flag football team lurching out of their seats to yell at him, their fingers pointed in his direction.

“I felt like I was about to get swarmed,” he said. “It was surreal.”

David Skjerli, a Pace University law student who co-moderated the panel on Prop 1. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

Nine days later, the situation became even stranger. Porter saw an email flash across his phone, titled “Notification Letter.”

“I felt scared, like time stopped. I was shocked,” he told me.

When he expanded the email, he saw a PDF attachment from Bernard Dufresne, the school’s Title IX coordinator, stating that Porter is being investigated for a potential act of “sex-based discrimination” against a transgender student who attended the Federalist Society event along with about two dozen members of the school’s LBGTQ+ affinity group. The charge? That he “aggressively pointed” at the transgender student and “purposefully referred to her as a man in front of classmates, law school faculty and administrators, and guests.” He now faces a disciplinary hearing that could result in community service, suspension, or even expulsion. He also worries that he won’t pass the “character and fitness” portion of the bar exam, which requires applicants in New York State to disclose any disciplinary actions against them. 

“Any type of punishment will be super detrimental to my reputation and to my professional career,” Porter said, wearing a suit and tie on a video call from his childhood bedroom at his family’s Westchester home. “It feels like my whole world is crumbling down. I feel like everything that I’ve been working toward might get destroyed over a misunderstanding.” 

The son of a Cuban mother and Filipino father, Porter told me he is paying his way through law school via a combination of scholarships, loans, and savings he made through previous dishwashing jobs. “I haven’t told my family yet,” he said. “My parents have sacrificed so much for me to go to law school—and they’re still sacrificing so much. I just don’t want all my family’s hard work to be for nothing just a semester and a half before I graduate.”

Porter told me the allegations against him are “not true” and a “mischaracterization of the facts.”

“There was so much noise, multiple people talking at once, so maybe someone in the crowd heard me say ‘sir,’ or call some individual ‘a man’ when they don’t identify as that,” he said. “But I didn’t say anything along those lines to the alleged person. I did say ‘excuse me’ to them and stood up, but I never made any gestures toward anyone.” 

Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, NY. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

The Free Press is withholding the name of the trans student who made the accusations against Porter. Pace’s Title IX coordinator Dufresne, who signed the letter—which was stamped with the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department logo—did not respond to multiple Free Press requests for comment.

Skjerli, who co-moderated the panel, told me he was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Porter when students in the front row began rushing toward the stage.

“I don’t understand why people are going after Houston,” he said, adding that there’s now a rumor that Houston called the transgender student a “fag”—a claim Skjerli emphatically denies, saying “I didn’t hear him say that word at all. I don’t know where they’re getting that from.”

Title IX is a 1970s-era provision originally intended to equalize educational and athletic opportunities for female students. But in recent years Title IX has been “weaponized” against students, often male, for offenses like drunken sex, stalking, and “emotional distress,” sometimes even by former girlfriends, KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College specializing in Title IX disciplinary proceedings, told The Free Press.

“Savvy students recognize that they can use the Title IX bureaucracy to punish opponents on campus, or simply people that they don’t like,” he said. “Instead of resolving issues through dialogue, or saying, ‘Hey, you’re a jerk,’ it’s become, ‘I’m going to invoke the power of the school against you.’ ”

Johnson says that in 1972, when Title IX first passed, the idea was to root out “systemic issues” of harassment or discrimination against girls and women. Now, under the Biden administration, a student’s gender identity is also protected under Title IX. Decades of small changes to the policy, all of which have gradually broadened what constitutes a Title IX violation, have allowed students to “make a tenable claim of sexual harassment for what in just about any other context would be viewed as completely protected speech,” Johnson said. 

Title IX applies only to educational institutions that accept federal funds. Although Pace is a private nonprofit university, its most recent tax filing states it took in $15,880,130 in government grants in 2022. 

“When Congress passed Title IX, they never could have dreamed that a case like this would be invoked,” Johnson said of the claims against Porter. 

A Title IX investigation accuses Houston Porter of having “aggressively pointed” at a transgender student. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

When I told Tricia Lindsay, an attorney who served as one of the three panelists at the Federalist Society event, about the Title IX investigation Porter now faces, she said, “He did nothing wrong.” 

“Most of the yelling was coming from the adults, not the students,” said Lindsay, who’s running as a Republican for a state senate seat and has been an outspoken critic of Proposition 1. “The professors were more of the problem than the students.”

“Academia used to be an environment where you could have a dialogue,” she added. “We talk so much about diversity and yet, when there’s a need to really honor diversity, we don’t have it. There is no diversity because we don’t respect diverse viewpoints.”

Pollans, one of the two professors in attendance, countered that claim, boasting that Pace is “an institution that genuinely respects different viewpoints” and trains its students to “listen to each other.” She added: “I was really proud of the many students at the event who did just that.”

However, when Porter emailed her a few days after the event, asking to withdraw from one of her classes because of her hostile reaction to the panel, she replied in an email seen by The Free Press, “Last week’s event did not unfold as any of us would have liked, but I hope that we can move forward from it and strengthen our community.” Porter said he went ahead with the withdrawal because he “did not feel safe in a class with her.” 

Pace University’s Elisabeth Haub School of Law in White Plains, NY. (Alex S.K. Brown for The Free Press)

Meanwhile, Pace professor McLaughlin said the panelists expressed “bigoted” views, although he was not seated close enough to Porter to hear his precise comments. Over a phone call, he told me that “members of the community had to sit there and hear their transgender colleagues being referred to in a misgendered way. They were onstage referring to trans girls as boys,” he said of the three panelists. “That’s misgendering them.”

McLaughlin told me that being anti–Prop 1 is a “legitimate point of view.” But he “won’t defend” a person’s “right to treat people of different groups differently.” 

“You have no right to question someone’s race or gender. Period. Stop. What gives you that right? What gives you that right?”

“If you have a position, then you need to be able to defend it in public and by the courage of your conviction,” he continued. “And if you can’t do that, then maybe you shouldn’t be holding confidence.” 

A Pace University spokesperson declined to comment on the charges against Porter, stating that “We are aware of the matter in question, speaking with the people involved, and following our internal process.” The spokesperson added that the school “respects differing perspectives and encourages expression” but does not “condone harassment or intimidation when parties disagree.” 

Porter, who is now in his third year of law school, said he wants to become a legal advocate for affordable housing. He had hoped law school would be a “marketplace of ideas,” but instead found that “if you don’t agree with the majority’s thinking, then the students will turn on you, the faculty will turn on you, and administration will turn on you.” 

“We knew the subject was touchy, but we wanted just to foster a professional discussion, and we wanted people who disagreed with us to come because even if they continue to disagree with us, we still have to talk, you know?” he said, adding that the school had previously held multiple events in support of Proposition 1 that went off without a hitch.

“It’s really scary that the future generation of lawyers who are supposed to hear both sides before they make a decision are basically convicting me without hearing my side of the story,” he said. “It makes us all better lawyers when we understand what the other side is saying, even if we may disagree with them.”

 

https://www.thefp.com/p/law-student-pace-university-title-ix-prop-1-expulsion?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=151133395&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Celebtards Unite In Desperate Final Attempt To Stop Trump

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Trump's Middle-Class Realignment

posted by Brian P. Burke ar American Thinker 

Donald Trump has realigned the Republican party’s base and correspondingly reshaped the Democratic party’s traditional core. Of course, the full extent -- and the efficacy -- of his reshuffling the two parties’ electoral structures will only be fully seen next week. But even today anyone can see that Vice President Harris is campaigning oblivious to this sea change in the electorate.

The Harris campaign has been hosting events with NeverTrumper establishment Republicans, D.C. insiders, and ridiculously rich celebrities who stoke unfounded fears over Trump’s supposed uncapped volatility, authoritarianism, and dangerousness to women’s medical freedoms. These endorsements are designed to prove the Vice-President’s centrism, especially with suburban women voters, and the purportedly estranging extremism of her opponent, especially to suburban women voters. Regardless of the genuineness of these conversions, peeling off these erstwhile GOP sachems -- many of whom Trump forced out of the party or were once despised by Democrats -- are not moving the needle in public polling.

Once, affluent suburban country club voters tended to vote their financial self-interests and favored conservative Republican candidates. The GOP’s presidential nominees were usually well known, decorous gentlemen dripping with foreign policy credentials and moral rectitude. These boring candidates famously waited in line for their turn to run and then ran boring campaigns nearly identical to the previous nominee’s.

Conversely, the bedrock of the Democratic electoral strength over the past half a century was broadly in the middle-class. Party apparatchiks demanded its rank-and-file base their votes on age cohort, socio-economic standing, and race. Blue-collar households, of which there were then many, grudgingly supported a host of liberal policies because Democratic candidates promised them well-paying jobs and financial security with nothing more than a high-school education -- all so long as these voters roundly rejected out-of-touch GOP candidates running from affluent bubbles. In self-righteous screeds such as 2004’s What's the Matter with Kansas? liberal intellectuals scorned voters in “flyover” parts of the country who refused to vote their pocketbooks instead of unsubstantial cultural issues.

But that was then -- before Trump.

The Democratic party now represents the nation’s affluent and is run largely for those who have become wealthy through embarrassingly lucrative employment in government and NGOs, consulting, big finance, high-tech, and other professions necessitating advanced degrees. White collar, double-income Democrat families have grown richer from public policies that have degraded and rendered prohibitively costly our once superior secondary education system, shipped good paying manufacturing jobs overseas, and, most recently, shut down huge sectors of the real economy while simultaneously growing profits in the digital industry.

During this timeframe, job creation in the non-upper-class sectors of the economy has cratered. In the past few years, any anemic employment growth realized has primarily favored non-citizens and related public sector fields settling these immigrants. And during the current presidential administration especially, the economic ills stemming from chronically disproportionate imbalance in income growth has been compounded by inflation mushroomingat rates not known for decades.

In next week’s election, nevertheless, the Harris campaign will still be asking middle-class voters to rally in favor of “reproductive rights,” LGBTQ progress, climate change, essentially open borders, political decorum, and so-called “saving democracy.” The Democratic party leadership will ask these same voters to disregard the fact that many of those same policies have decimated their well-paying jobs, exposed them and their families to violent crime, and disastrously heightened the cost of living more than any period in the past forty years. Even more astonishingly, the Harris campaign will make this political “ask” despite the fact these policies have done far more tangible harm to these financially precarious Democratic voters.

The economically advantaged suffer the financial and emotional stressors of inflation and the affiliated contractions in the economy much less acutely than lower socio-economic classes. Those living in lower-income communities are closer in proximity to the violence and social dysfunction consistently besetting big cities and that coarsen and endanger their lives. Likewise, the hardships that invariably flow from accommodating uncontrolled immigration are generally experienced less significantly by the upper class, whose members may even view cheap labor which does not threaten their professional-type livelihoods as a boon. With a clearer pathway to achieving their material needs, the financial elites are at greater liberty to predicate their votes on vindicating women’s nationwide unrestricted access to abortion and fertility treatments, spurious allegations of fascistic proclivities in conservative office seekers, or simply to fiercely signal their own peculiar ideas of civic virtue and their “oh so righteous” anger against Trump.

Conversely, middle-class voters have found themselves priced out of housing, automobile, and insurance markets like never before. It has become increasingly difficult for Americans without an advanced degree to maintain the same economic lifestyle as their parents and grandparents enjoyed. Additionally, black and Hispanic voters in blue-collar households are at heart conservative on most social and economic issues which do not touch upon their race and more vulnerable to  economic downturns. In short, all hard-pressed working people in this country, especially the young men in those communities, have been discovering the painful downsides of backing extravagant liberal policies of a political organization that now predominantly represents not their interests, but those of the bicoastal privileged.

Is it any wonder that that the once loyal middle-class voter feels doubly abandoned by the Democrat party?

Donald Trump speaks to these abandoned middle-class voters. The former President is building a formidable coalition of white, black, and brown voters living in less affluent communities. Trump’s most significant political accomplishment in this election may very well be reducing the class, youth, and racial gap in the Republican vote to levels not seen since the 1960s.Undoubtedly, Trump’s campaign rhetoric, record, and policy positions have affronted more affluent, formerly conservative voters and led to a pronounced gender gap. But this is what an immense massive political realignment, or at least this particular realignment, looks like. Judging from recent national and swing state polling, however, the number of establishment Republicans flocking to Harris’s banner are being offset by Trump’s inroads with traditionally Democratic voting subsets in working-class communities who are increasingly distressed by their more authentic financial struggles and threats to their personal well-being.

The Harris campaign's high-risk gamble is that these polls may be unreliable insofar as they markedly underestimate a larger than expected turnout from staid conservatives who were once reliably Republican and/or irate women voters. On the other hand, it seems just as likely at this point that the Democrats’ fervently hoped-for intensity in their new voting bloc will be counterbalanced by lower levels of support from an outsized number of average American voters on whom they have customarily depended to win previous elections. Not nearly so outraged by Trump’s occasional blustering because they cannot afford to be, those formerly faithful working-class voters are increasingly less inclined to cast a ballot for the nominee of an increasingly oligarchic Democratic party that has shown itself profoundly indifferent to the crushing difficulties they face daily.

However, dropping endorsements from well-heeled former Republicans and politicking on saving democracy won’t do much at all to recapture that segment of the Democrats’ base that has drifted away and moved towards Trump’s new GOP. Or put another way, Harris and the Democratic party are not trying to treat the fever in the newly realigned body politic, they are campaigning as if this partisan realignment was itself the sole cure.

Are Democrats Operating a Money-Laundering Scheme?

Tom Tradup reporting for Townhall 

With the 2024 Presidential campaign in its final hours, attention among many Capitol Hill insiders is shifting to the battle for control of Congress. And if House investigators are successful in their investigations, Democrat fundraising website ACT BLUE may turn out to have been functioning as an illegal money-laundering operation for foreign campaign contributions.

House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-KY) has issued subpoenas for individuals who have knowledge of how ACT BLUE may have been funneling foreign money from places like Iran, China and North Korea into Democratic Party campaign coffers…by attaching names of unsuspecting Americans to “donations” about which they knew nothing.

On the Salem Media Group news program THIS WEEK ON THE HILL with Tony Perkins, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was blunt in his assessment of Democratic Party fundraising: “Evidence is mounting,” Johnson contends, “that the Democrats are using this ill-gotten gain. They’re using ACT BLUE which is their online fundraising juggernaut they brag about…and they’ve raised $16-billion through allegedly small contributions since the site was created over a decade ago.”

Johnson says “allegedly” because House investigators believe ACT BLUE is channeling large, illegal foreign contributions into Democratic Congressional candidate coffers by taking names and addresses of actual American citizens and attaching them to Democrat campaigns as if they are small dollar donors when in actuality these folks have no idea their identities are being misused this way.

“This obviously looks to be a money-laundering operation involving foreign nationals and we don’t really know how big it is yet, and I think people will be going to jail eventually,” Johnson adds. Despite theavalanche of contributions funneled through ACT BLUE, he believes Republicans will still retain control of the House of Representatives because in his view the outcome is not dependent upon the quantity of cash but rather the quality of candidates the voters will elect.

The Speaker suggests that in these final hours of the campaign, men and women wo have any concerns that they might have be used without their consent by ACT BLUE or any other website they should take action by logging onto the website www.CheckMyDonation.org and type in their name and address to find out if they, too, have been named as “donors” without their consent. 

Insofar as the race for the Presidency between Donald J. Trump and Kamala Harris, Mike Johnson was pretty upset this week when Democrat Harris took his words out of context and began whipping up crowds at her campaign rallies suggesting the Speaker plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

“They know they’re lying,” Johnson charges. “They just made it up, and the Vice President then repeated it for distribution by her mainstream media allies. I was in New York, and I immediately told a gaggle of reporters that Kamala Harris is lying.”  Hard stop. 

Johnson believes that this is what desperate campaigns do, and that Harris has nothing substantive to run on. From the very beginning of her being anointed as the nominee of the Democratic Party without receiving a single vote, he contends, Kamala Harris has been a failure. He concludes by saying that in every area of public policy or hands-on governing,America sees disasters and she is the architect of them. 

From the crisis at the grocery store checkout lanes to the soaring cost of gasoline, not to mention foreign policy blunders like the Harris/Biden administration scurrying out of Afghanistan as American soldiers laid dead at Bagram Airfield, Americans see failure. And they don’t like it. 

To quote Donald J. Trump’s slogan in the last week of campaigning: “Kamala Broke It…Trump Will Fix It.”

On Tuesday, November 5th, we shall see if American voters give Trump a mandate to once more roll up his sleeves and—repeat after me—Make America Great Again.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

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More and More People Shattering Common AR-15 Talking Point

posted by Tom Knighton at Townhall 

How many times have you either watched or been party to a discussion where someone tries to make the claim that the AR-15 should be banned because it's not useful for hunting?

My guess is a lot. On one hand, the Second Amendment isn't about hunting, so that's irrelevant. On the other, it seems a lot of people are shattering that talking point.

See, a lot of people out there don't realize that the reason the AR-15 isn't considered a hunting weapon isn't because it's too dangerous. On the contrary, the 5.56/.223 round isn't really powerful enough to ensure a humane kill. The rounds are illegal in many states for deer hunting because they're not powerful enough.

Now, those calibers are great for taking things like coyotes and other varmints, and have been used as such.

But the AR-style of rifle comes in other calibers, many of which are powerful enough for something like deer or other large game.

Does Kamala Know This Isn't an Executive Action? Matt Vespa

And it seems a lot of people are picking them up for hunting in general.

“

Hunting with AR-style rifles, also known by some as Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) and others simply as ARs, has seen a remarkable increase in use in the field by sportsman over the past decade. This is according to recent research from the Outdoor Stewards of Conservation Foundation (OSCF). A survey conducted by Responsive Management for OSCF found 41 percent of hunters now use AR-style rifles for hunting, up from 25 percent in 2014.

This rise is attributed to the firearms’ modularity, versatility and increased accessibility.

“The growing use of ARs for hunting is on the rise, which does not surprise me,” said OSCF executive director Jim Curcuruto. “The survey showed that over half of hunters who do not currently use ARs have expressed interest in using them in the future.”

The survey, which included responses from more than 500 hunters across various demographics, examined preferences in hunting firearms and reasons for using ARs. Nearly a quarter of AR hunters surveyed have been using the firearm for six to 10 years, and around 57 percent adopted the platform in the past five years. Maybe surprisingly, large game, including deer and elk, is the most common target for AR hunters, with 80 percent of respondents citing it as their main quarry. That is up from 57 percent in 2014 and is likely due to two factors: 1) more people have become familiar with the benefits of using an AR-platform rifle and 2) the platform offers many more chamberings in calibers better suited for larger game. Big game, primarily deer, is also the most hunted game in North America. Small game, such as rabbits and squirrels, remained stable in preference.

The survey didn’t specify predator hunters, but it is likely their numbers, interest in and use of the AR platform has remained fairly consistent as well. Predator hunters were among the first group of hunters to really latch on to and make widespread use of ARs, particularly the AR-15 whose original chambering in .223 Rem. remains ideal for smaller critters such as coyotes, foxes, bobcats and ground hogs.

”

Now, I reiterate that whether or not a firearm is useful for hunting isn't relevant when discussing the right to keep and bear arms. The only thing the Second Amendment was meant to preserve our right to hunt is tyrants. Whether a gun can take an elk or a moose isn't important. It's whether we can defend this nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic with it.

And the AR-15 is well suited for that.

But there are a lot of ordinary voters who don't understand that. They don't comprehend that hunting isn't what the Second Amendment is about and think that if a gun isn't a hunting weapon, there's no reason to have it.

For those, well, it's useful to point out how many people are hunting with these non-hunting rifles, and are hunting more and more kinds of game, which should be a useful talking point when dealing with these low-information types.

No, it shouldn't matter, but that's in an ideal world. We don't live in an ideal world. We live in this one, so anything that can be used to undermine the anti-gun argument is a good thing.