Speaker 1: And we're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm your guest host, Tristan Justice, and as always, you
can email the show at radio at the Federalist dot com,
follow us on x at FDR LST, make sure to
subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website as well. I'm joined
today by our GC columnist Eddie Scarry, who graciously agreed
to indulge kind of a project I had about a
month ago. I reached out to Eddie asking if he
would be willing to read a book by a leftist
author or politician and then take a podcast about it.
And so, since this was a month ago, we figured
what better book than the Democratic Party's new presidential nominee
Kamala Harris's The Truths Behold? Eddie, thanks for doing this
and how are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm doing well, and of course there's nowhere else I'd
rather be.
Speaker 1: So there's a whole bunch of different topics we can
discuss and get into, but I wanted to start by
asking what are your perceptions of Kama Harris now after
you read the book versus before, and how did that change?
Speaker 2: Well, you know these books are they're all the same. So,
and by all the same, I mean it's a campaign book.
They're basically meant to, you know, misologize the whoever it
is that's running. Almost always for president is when these
books come out, both Republican and Democrat, it's always, you know,
my humble beginnings and then this is what got me
interested in public service. These were my role models. And
then and then of course you get into what their
actual experience and their adult careers, their public life to
the extent that they've been elected to office lower office
than president, and you know, on and on. So they're
all the same, they're not really meant I don't I'm
trying to think of one of these books that I
might have read. I've probably read a handful of them
over the years. The one I remember reading and enjoying
actually was Sarah Palin's book. So that would have been
like what two thousand and nine or something, and I
don't even remember the title, but this was this They
came out after after that campaign was over, that two
thousand and eight presidential campaign, and she was the Republican
running mate. I remember enjoying that book because she does
have at least the story I found interesting her personal
story about being in Alaska and how she ran for
mayor of I guess it was Wassilla and then became governor,
and really was this kind of it at least seemed
to be one of those stories of what they're all
trying to grasp, which is like a person who kind
of just finds themselves interested in politics and wanting to
make a difference. And so I liked that one, But
most of them are like this kambla one pretty harmless.
But doll did I I can't say that it changed
my impression. And this one came out in twenty nineteen,
I guess, and the lead up to her to her
way to run for president in the twenty twenty cycle,
it didn't change much. There were some moments that I thought, Okay,
I can I think that by the way, she's because
I listened to the book. I did the audio book.
Did you read it like physically text or did you
listen to it?
Speaker 1: I did a little bit of both. I really like
it when authors will narrate their own audiobook, and especially
if it's a memoir, because memoir is my favorite genre
to read. So I listened to it first on a
twenty hour drive from Colorado to Ohio, so you may
cover half the drive. But it was interesting how she
started out with And then of course I read through
the book and took some notes, but I thought it
was really interesting how she started with, this is not
going to policy book. This is just going to be
a book about my life, and look at me, I'm
such a genuine, authentic, down to earth person. And then
the whole thing ended up being like a policy book.
I mean it was like every other page it was
like and then I proposed this bill to deal with
that issue, and then I did this, did you to
do that? And the whole book was so clearly design
by someone who wanted to run for president.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. And that's again kind of like how
do all these books go? And even if you know,
even if there is some kind of insure that's like,
I'm not here to run for president via this book.
I just want you to get to know me. Pretty silly.
But I will say that there were some parts that
I could feel her, those those faint flickers of humanity
coming through. There was like the part where she talks
about when her mom told her that she had cancer.
That was you know, you kind of feel like you're
talking to a real person there, or you're getting you're
getting an inner glimpse of their their inner soul in
a way. And then I do think there were there
were parts where she talked about her career in the
legal area. So not really when she became a senator,
obviously we're going to get to that, and then not
now that she's vice president, because this was written before then.
But the parts where she talked about her interest in
the law, the legal profession, I felt like they're actually
to the extent that she actually has interest in public service,
if you want to call it that. I think that
that's where it mostly came through. But back to your interest,
your your original question about did it change my impression?
Not really? Not really.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I did actually skip the part about her mom.
I do this with every book I read. I just
every time. I mean, Katie Kirk did this. I read
her book this summer and some others. Every time. In
these memoirs they get to like death to Parents, I
just I have to just past forward and I either
skip the rest of the chapter or I just hit
board the fifteen seconds on spot I thought, but no,
we definitely have to talk about her early resume experience,
because after the Washington Freebeacon reported last week that she
apparently had been making up for her experience at McDonald's,
I actually went through the book to see if I
can find it myself, and she hasn't talked anywhere about
working the drive through the friar as a customer service
rep at McDonald's. And you would think for a California
leftist senator who is chasing socialist votes, she would make
having worked at McDonald's a centerpiece of every single campaign
she had run since district attorney, and that was nowhere
to be found in there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, if you look back, actually, and I'm not
going to pretend I'm some like hard student of Kamala
Harris's career, she kind of I remember when she was
endorsed by Obama for I guess for I think for
both ag attorney general in California and then eventually the
Senate a long time ago. Now at this point, I
don't know if you remember this, but he he called
her in public like the most attractive attorney general that
we have. It was like this big controversy that a
man called, you know, called would dare to like comment
on her looks, and then like this was a whole
news cycle and then it even like the White House
even ended up having to say President Obama he actually
personally called Kamala to apologize to her for what he said.
It's just kind of kind of a ridiculous controversy that
he actually called her attractive, and that's supposed to be,
you know, some scandal, but the McDonald's thing. So I know,
we were talking about this just among ourselves with the Federalists,
and whether it's true, it wouldn't surprise me. It wouldn't
surprise me that she made this up. I mean Democrats,
they just seem to make stuff up's And she's working
right under Joe Biden, who literally will just say anything
to whoever he's in front of it. You know, he'll
be in front of Irish people, he says he's Irish
and they used to call him Obiden. He's in front
of like Italians and he'll swear that his family was
the mafia. Like he will say anything to anybody. So
maybe that's where she's picked. And you know, now we
have Tim Wallas, her running mate, who's he lied about
you know, extensively lied about his military record and other things.
And now we now know that he lied about claiming
that his family used the IVF procedure when in fact
he did not. So you know, there's this whole lying thing.
But you know that the McDonald's stuff is I would
say kind kind of beside the point, but I also
would say it to the extent that I think, okay,
that's a problem. In her book, she makes herself seem
like she has as often these these books do her
for the authors of them, makes herself seem like she's
from this humble background they refer in the campaign. It's
about how she's all middle class. I mean, I don't
know if people have different ideas about what the middle
class is, what the working class is. But her mom
was this prestigious biologist. Her dad was a tenured professor
at Stanford. She talked about how she how she went
to a uh performing arts school. I'm like, is this
what people think of when they say that they've got
these humble beginnings in the middle class and or or
from the working class, because that that certainly wasn't my
experience growing up. And I say, we basically went from
working class to middle class via my parents and their
you know, their professional lives. But I certainly wasn't going
to you know, performing arts schools. They weren't. They weren't
these impressive scholars at top notch universities. So you know,
for her to like kind of revise her history and
say I worked out a McDonald's and that's that's that's
more evidence of just how working class am. I mean,
if it's a lie, it just goes even further to
the fact that she's portraying herself as something that she
is not not at all.
Speaker 1: Well, when you read the book, it sounds it sounds
she made in her book. She sounds she tried to
make her sound like she had come up from you know,
poor background and a working class and that's of course
you just laid out her parents were prestige of professors
and had good jobs. But I mean, her book makes
her sound to seem like you said something that she's not.
And I thought it was a very clear contrast to
the book from JD. Vance, which I also read this summer,
where it almost had nothing to do with policy, and
I felt like that book was so much more authentic
and genuine because It was written by someone who probably
didn't know they were going to run for office. I mean,
maybe he did, maybe he was plotting house to card style,
but I don't think he'll Billy Elogy was written by
someone who thought they were going to be president someday.
Speaker 2: I thought it was just a.
Speaker 1: Venture capitalist writing about growing up in Appalachia, and I
really felt like a lot more of his character came
out of the book, whereas this one, it was definitely
a political memoir design for someone who want who wanted
to be president, and and doing that, she tried to
make hersel to be some poor girl in Oakland who
had rose over the odds to become district attorney and
then attorney general and then and then so on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that, and I think I'm sure
that Jadevans, I mean, it looks like he's kind of
his whole life had ambitions for something, just you know.
And I don't know how far in advance he was
thinking about what his trajectory would be. But I think
that even though he's been an ambitious person, I would agree.
I haven't read the book, I watched the movie, and
everything I've heard about the book he'llbili elegy. That sounds
about right that he was. He was probably more so
interested in bringing a story to a national audience and
bringing like a real story that hasn't been told. And
that really does make the difference in these types of
or when you have political figures or people who would
eventually become political figures writing these books, you can tell
whether they whether they care about you know what it
is that they do they really care that she did
Kamala Harris really want to write a book and bring
people into her life and show who Kamala Harris is.
I would not have got that from this book at all.
But again that's not I don't that's the not the
purpose of a book like this, and she's not alone
in this this genre of book where that would be
the case. Again, I think I just going through it
heard like just flickers, and I just keep saying heard
because I listened to the audiobook, I heard like the
flickers of humanity, the things that really touched her, the
things that were really deeply personal to her life, and
it was very few and far between. Like you said,
she said it wasn't a policy book, but it's it's
a There was a lot of this stuff in this book.
That's number cramming, just cramming in these numbers to make
a point about, you know, all the things that government
should be doing to fix these problems. And oftentimes she's
she's pointing out real problems, but she's misdiagnosing them. And
definitely the proposal she had where you know, the whole thing.
We make fun of this a lot only because we're
so like shocks by it, just the media now that
now that she's the Democrat nominee, the way she's able
to just act like she didn't have any of these positions,
they're right there in her book. They're right there in
her book from what from twenty nineteen that was not
that long ago. They're right there in her book where
she's saying like I want to give, like take the
issue and she's talking about it, it's always money. It's
always you know, I want to give a tax for
and you know, I don't know about you. I would
think this probably applies to you, But not a single
one of these things is intended to help someone like me.
It's in fact, intended to take away money from someone
like me and give it to somebody else. So you know,
they try to say now that well, she's changed her positions,
and you know, the Republicans are trying to paint her
as this left wing radical. It's like it's in her book.
Did anybody read her book?
Speaker 3: Would Kamala's proposed raised and corporate tax affect you the consumer?
The watch Dout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski.
Every day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and
the economy and how it affects your wallet. Kamala is
proposing raising corporate tax rates from twenty one to twenty
eight percent. Corporations are the ones selling stuff and providing services.
By raising taxes, they raise the prices on things that
they sell to you. Whether it's happening in DC or
down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 2: Be informed.
Speaker 3: Check out the watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: I do think well on Jadie Vance's book. He wrote
that book and it was published in twenty sixteen. People
wanted him to run for Senate in twenty eighteen. He
actually passed on that, and of course he didn't. He
didn't run until recently in twenty two for the Senate seat.
But I thought Harris the only personal parts of the
book that came through where she's kind of seemed like
a normal person. When she was talking about her family.
I really liked when she was talking about her kind
of marriage story with Doug Gamoff. I thought that was
actually really well done. But when it comes to policy's
she's been flipping her position on just everything she believed
in from five years ago this summer, and I think
immigration is a perfect example of that. She has a
whole page and a half in this book trashing Donald
Trump's border wall, and then she comes out like two
weeks ago talking about how actually know she's for boarder
wall funding. And so if you know, if you have
a candidate who is not going to put out a
comprehensive policy platform, what better place to look than their
own policy memoir published just five years ago. And of
course there's there's proposals in here that are just straight
up socialist. But on immigration especially, it's night and day.
I mean, she's talking about the wall being immoral, She's
talking about it contradicting this narrative of the United States
being a nation immigrants she's talking about the symbolism of it,
she's talking about the money of it. And of course
now she comes out and you know, two months before
an election where the border is the biggest issue, and
just every single public pull out there showing that the
border and the economy are what voters care about most.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course she does this with great assists
from the national news media, just pretending like none of
her record, not only that none of her record exists,
as as you know, when she ran for president, the
way she voted in the Senate, the things she said
while she was in the Senate, the things she said
while she was running as Joe Biden's running mate, but
the things that happened while she was in office, which
she currently is still in office. It's like, it's as
if none of this is happening, none of it exists.
There's nothing to across reference, you can't there's no way
to compare what she says now to what she said
just even two months ago. It's really something to see.
But again, I think, and we actually just saw last night,
because that's when as we're recording this, that's when the
CNN interview, her first actual national televised interview as the
Democrat nominee came out. It really is I think I
think there's a strategy here. I think that is it
is to have it both ways, so that whatever you
see at any given time, you're not really sure where
she stands, because you'll have news reports that report in
earnest without any kind of context of the shifting positions.
You'll have them these were news reports, say from her
anonymous campaign aids she actually does want to close the border.
She actually is the first thing she wants to do
is battle inflation, you know, on and on, and then
you'll have her come on CNN and say, I haven't
changed anything about my values. Nothing has changed. And so
I think that, you know, voters are just kind of left, like, well,
I don't really know which to believe, but I'm being
told by the media at least that she's a moderate.
There's this is not some radical person. When I see
her on TV, she seems, you know, like a nice person.
So I don't feel weird if I want to go
ahead and vote for her, because I don't really care
for Donald Trump, you know. So I actually find there
to be a strategy there, and again with great assists
from the media who acts like nobody can actually they
act like they themselves have no capacity or ability to
go back and check the things that she said before
starting with this.
Speaker 1: Book, right, and well, she's she's in the media is
letting her do this, But she's trying to run as
the change candidate. She's running as the change candidate who's
party in office. I think she's what has she been
doing for the past four years other than getting threados
at gas stations? But I want to read. I want
to read part from this book on when she's talking
about the border wall. She's talking about the bill, the
pudget bill in twenty eighteen that was a compromise to
give Republicans funding for the border wall in exchange for
a pass citizenship for Dreamers. And so she writes about
why she opposed the compromise, and she calls the border
wall quote a useless wall on the southern border would
be nothing more than a symbol, a monument, standing in
opposition to not just everything I value, but to the
fundamental values upon which this country was built. And then
she goes on to say, at the end of this paragraph,
how could I vote to build what would be little
more than a monument designed to send the cold, hard
message keep out, so voters probably have. It's the one
that somebity voters have whiplash now because now again, five
years later, she comes out and endorses border wall funding
for a larger compromise buil ill. And of course she
didn't even do it herself. She'd do it from a
campaign aid, which seems to be just about all her
latest policy positions have been coming through spokesmen or campaign aids,
and they're not even coming from her herself.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And not only that, but it wasn't even I
want to say it was maybe last year. It might
have even been as far back as twenty twenty two,
because like you just quoted from the book where she
said this was the wall would have been a monument
to tell people to keep out. There was the famous
quote of her as the borders are, which they again
now deny that she ever was, where she said, don't come,
don't come. Okay, So yeah, now we're shifting from the book.
Now we're also pretending that actually neither the book happened,
nor has she been in office. You know, And I
think if you watched the interview last night on CNN,
you really can tell that this is someone who she
doesn't know what she's supposed to say any given moment,
and she's not helped by the fact that she has
said everything since she's been on the national scene, since
she became since she was elected to the Senate, and
I guess that was the twenty sixteen, so at the
same time that Trump was elected. You know, she has
had so many positions and has a record of saying
so many different things that in the moment, she's not
sure exactly what to say. You can even see on
her face that she looks pain, like she's in pain
and she's struggling to figure out what it is she
wants to say. So a lot of this is really
her own doing. And I do think I don't have
high hope for the media or anything. But the more
that we see of her, and this is what they're
worried about. But the more we see of her and
we actually see her challenge on this stuff, the worse
it's going to get for her.
Speaker 1: Oh, she was clearly so uncomfortable in the interview with
Dana Bash and Tim. Tim Walls is just sitting next
to her, looking even more uncomfortable as he's watching her
get these answers, and it kind of it kind of
came to mind that meme from the Office where Michael
Scott is talking about how sometimes I'll just start a
sentence and I don't really even know where it's going.
I just keep talking. And that's exactly what happens with
Kamala Harris. And I especially love the part where she's
asked about Israel and she goes and you can it's
just a deer in headlights, and she goes, I am
absolutely committed to defending Israel and the right for Israel
to have defense. Just complete, complete circles.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, real quick, I actually believe she has this.
She has this uncanny ability to set herself up to
look stupid. So and I'm not I don't mean that
she like low iq or like a stupid person, because
I don't think she is. I think she's just not
very savvy and not very good at navigating, you know,
being in the public eye, that kind of thing. And
you know, one of those moments in the book, I
know I mentioned to you while we were both kind
of going through it was she was it is the
one of the chapters or one of the sections on
immigration and she's talking and you know, you remember the
Trump year is just the hysteria over anything that the administration,
that Trump administration tried to do to manage to say
nothing of stop and halt the flow of destitute migrants,
millions and millions of them coming from South America, Central America,
anything that did. It was just the reaction from the
news media and from Democrats, just hands in hand, just
hair on fire. You can't do that. You're separating, you're
separating families, you're putting kids in cages. You know, all
just lies and lies and lies. But there was this
one particular moment where she recalled and this is this
is meant to make her look very concerned and like
someone who's really taking initiative as a center on this issue.
She she wants to know, I think it was she says,
she wants to know what's happening to make to ensure
that children are not being like indefinitely separated from their parents.
And just like just to remind listeners, it is it
is a crime to cross the border, just like any crime.
When they when they instituted the when was Jeff Sessions
instituted in no tolerance policy. When you commit a crime,
you go to jail, your kids cannot go to jail
with you. That is that that is true for Americans here,
that is going to be true for anyone who violates
the law and comes across the border. So what they
were doing is taking the parents to jail and then
so they could process them for the crime, and the
kids have to go somewhere else. She says, she wants
to know what's going what is the administration doing to
make sure that kids are not being separated from their parents,
and definitely so where they're getting lost in the system.
And she says, so I called General Kelly, who is
the Department of Homeland Security secretary, I believe at the time.
I called him, demanding to know and he's and she's
this is in her book, she's relaying this story that
because this like apparently happened at night. He says to her,
why are you calling me at home about this? And
you just have to think in your mind, like yeah,
like I mean, you are a senator, but directly call
the secret a cabinet secretary with your questions about a
policy issue while he's at home, Like what are you thinking?
What were you thinking? But clearly she thought this was
going to make her look really strong and taking initiative
and concerned, when in fact, it just made you. You
see this, if you imagine that scene in your head,
you're like, what were you thinking when you did that?
Speaker 1: It sounded like she was calling him like super late too,
Like I don't think the Secretary of Homeland Security, who
deals with national security would be offended by a city
US senator calling them at six seven, eight o'clock at night.
But I do think that would be the response to
come if it was like midnight, right, And she writes,
and she and she mocks it. She says that was
his chief concern. And of course I just wonder what
time that call actually came. But since we were talking
about the word salids that come from her all all
the time, I love that the word salads actually made
it into this book some of her most famous lines.
I mean, I was in disbelief when I was listening
to the audiobook and think, wait, she said that a
thousand times since then, and I just have one prominent
example of it, she writes towards the end and the
chapter on what I've learned, she writes, the innovation is
the pursuit of what can be unburdened by what has been.
And I don't even know what that means, and I
don't think she even knows what that means, but somehow
it made it into this book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because she's been saying that forever, and I mean,
I guess, to be generous. It sounds like she's saying
but it is like it is kind of a silly phrase,
because I get again, to be generous, I assume what
she means is there are new things that are kind
of untethered to any kind of problems or anything that
prohibited progress or advancement. But it also it just sounds
super clunky. But the fact that she keeps using it
despite everyone making fun of it and no one really
knowing exactly what she means, shows that she thinks that's
a real banger. And it goes kind of to my
previous point that I was just making about how she
has this tendency to set herself up to look very
stupid and not even realize it.
Speaker 1: It's like she's trying to sound like a philosopher who
is super intelligent, who I think someone mocked her. She
sounds like the person giving a book report on the
book that she didn't actually read. Oh yeah, And I
think that's such an apt analogy, and that's really how
just about the whole book read.
Speaker 2: Hey, real quick, real quick, because I was looking at
I'm looking at my notes on just things that I
wrote down that I really wanted to touch on. One
was that she keeps saying LATINX or is that how
she keeps pronouncing it. She was pronouncing it in a way. No,
she was saying it LATINX LATINX, So you know, that's
the instead of saying Latino that the liberals and Democrats
and left wingers they came up with the Latin X
at the end of it, and that's supposed to be
more like inclusive and gender neutral, and she keeps saying it,
and it's it's just more cringe because I think everyone
has kind of determined that that was counterproductive and in fact,
like Latino like no Latino, no real Latino actually uses
that to refer to themselves. But she says it over
and over and again in the book, and I just
I thought that was kind of remarkable. And then one
more thing that I that I made sure to write
kind of like an extensive note about she talked about
when she was an intern. This is while she was
an undergrad at Howard University here in DC, and she
was an intern at the Federal Trade commit And she
says that her job was her job was like doing clips,
which that's a common intern job where you basically have
to go through newspapers. At the time, it would have
been newspapers, probably not the Internet. Go through newspapers and
anything that would be of interest of your superior as
your bosses. You're clipping those articles so that they and
you give them like a folder each day so that
they can read and see what are the what is
the media coverage like about what they're doing. So she
has this this little job as an intern. Nothing wrong
with that at the FTC. But this the reason I
bring this up is because this you know, there's a
this idea that she's a dei higher for the Biden administration,
which she in fact was, because you know, it was
it was explicitly stated that she would that Biden want
to hire woman so that narrows down the field based
on gender. Then in the year of George Floyd, it
was definitely going to be a black woman. And I
think even James Clyburn in South Caro line of lobbied
for the like pressure that there be that the woman
running might be black. She says how as the intern
doing these clippings, there were there were superiors to her
that were saying, I'm so proud to see like a
woman of color here, as you know, and someone who's
interested in public service and that, and that was like
the shining moment for her. But you know, I look,
I read that or listened to that, and I thought,
this is the typical Dei trajectory, though, which is someone
who's doing the like bare minimum, the same thing that
anybody would be expected to do in a normal job,
but being like harolded because they're black, because they're a woman,
minority whatever. It's like, well, you're special because you're doing
this bare minimum job. And I just the fact that
she included that clearly meant it. It resonated with her.
She thought that it would resonate with others, and just
to me, I thought, yeah, you to take offense at
being called a Dei person. This is exactly where it starts,
this kind of episode where you suddenly start thinking that
you're exceptional and special because of your identity.
Speaker 1: Right the identity. I mean I knew that going into
this book that the identity politics was going to be
off the charts. I mean, she was the DEI candidate
in twenty twenty explicitly so like you just said, but
also she was the I mean, Democrats cannot have picked
a more emblematic candidate of their obsession with identity politics
than Kamala Harris. I mean, that was Elaine Charanan and
twenty nineteen and twenty twenty, and of course that's Lane,
that's Slaine. Of course she ran for vice president and
that's what she has now. But in her book she
kind of elludes to the facting she keeps talking about
her blended family and the DNC kept talking about her
blended family, and like no one really cares. Frankly, that's
the whole that's kind of the whole point. And this
kind of assumption that people in America today are offended
by interracial couple with an interracial family is I mean
that to me, the accusation alone is so offensive, This
assumption that she has to justify having I don't know
a single Republican conservative whatever that would be offended by
a quote blended family. Now, and of course she places
this card throughout the entire book. Oh you know, look
at our blended family, blended family, blunded family. Of course,
it was like a major theme of the DNC but
no one. But here's the thing with Democrats. They need
racism and homophobia and sexism to exist on the level
that they claim it does, because that's what they've been
running on for the past ten twenty years. They need
racism to exist at such a level that they can
campaign against it, because otherwise they don't really have a
ton of things to campaign on. I mean, Kamala Harrish,
she can't campaign on the border, and she can't she
certainly can't run on the economy. So he's going to
run on abortion and identity politics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the division that it really causes is just
it's something that everyone should be depressed about and lament
because it's a lie starting or I would say, first
and foremost, Yeah, with the lie that police are just
indiscriminately gunning down black people, harmless, innocent black people for
no reason that literally, like statistically speaking, never happens. And
on top of that, what I have always taken a
particular interest in when it comes to the whole racism
lie is how everything they say about race relations geographically
in this country, it's the exact opposite. I am from
the working class South South Carolina, Charleston, near Charleston, that's
where I grew up. I can tell you we don't.
And that's where you have in the South. It's like
around thirty I guess, so thirteen percent or so of
the population nationally is black. Thirty percent of the population
in the South is black, So that's where they're mostly concentrated.
I can tell you that everything they say about you know,
you'd swear that the clan still runs like the entire
like it's still like Dixie Land or something, and it
is just not true. We never it's never talked about.
Nobody mentions it. You go, like the people who go
to work, they're working with all sorts of it's completely
diverse people, the kids at school, completely diverse. Growing up
almost yeah, I would say almost all my friends growing
up were black. It's just not something that's talked about now.
In places like where Kamma is from in California and
places like where Hillary Clinton loves to live in New York,
those places, yes, you encounter real racism from white liberals
who do not want black people living in their neighborhoods,
don't want them going to their kids' schools. So the
whole thing is just this wild projection where in the
same thing, I would say, the same thing in Washington,
d C. It's just this wild projection of you know,
where we live, that stuff happens, so we assume that
where everyone else is it's the same thing, and when
in fact it's the complete opposite. The working class, the
middle class in the South and in Middle America doesn't
have doesn't spend a second thinking about blended families and
Kamala Harris's you know, what's her ethnic background, like nobody cares.
What they care about is are you an honest person?
Do you Are you a hard working person? Are you
someone who gets ahead on merit? Instead, it's like you're
not even you're not even supposed to despite liberals say
we need to have we need to have these DEI
and diversity initiatives, all that equity initiatives. But if you
point it out, if you point out that someone like
Kamala Harris has advanced on those things, well now you're
the bigot. It's just it's so mindwarping what they get
away with.
Speaker 1: Right, And it's just we're talking about Danny politics. We
probably have to discuss Donald Trump's comment this summer in
July when he kind of went after her authenticity when
he said, oh, I didn't know if she was black,
she just kind of became black. Well, that's what actually
leftists was saying in the presidential primary of four years ago.
And I think that's what Trump was alluding to, just
kind of in a typical Trump fashion with not most careful,
careful wording. But I actually thought it was an interesting
kind of political point that he was making in that
Kamala Harris never took off in the twenty twenty Democrat
primary with black voters, even though she was the most
prominent black candidate in the race, she never took off
with African American voters in that race because and this
is what leftists were saying in the Washington Post. By
the way, this is not you know, the Federalist or
the Daily Caller or some conservative media narrative that legacy
media was trying to cover up. No, this is from
the Washington Post. You had African American activists complaining that
Kamala Harris is Jamaican, an Indian, not African American, and
so that distinction doesn't matter to you know, the white
woke liberals who were righteously outraged by Donald Trump being
so called racist again in July, those people who already
can vote against Trump anyway. But I think it was
very kind of interesting how the Democrats played up those
comments so much and made them so viral that they
actually played to their own base, which is black voters.
And again, while that distinction being Indian Jamaican as opposed
to African American doesn't matter to white woke liberals, it
apparently matters to African Americans who say that she didn't
share the same black experience in America. You know, Barack Obama,
he broke up with that white girl in college and
then married a black woman and kind of lean into
black culture. Harris didn't really do that, and I think
the electorate kind of reflected that four years ago in
that primary where black voters make up the majority voters
and the Democratic Party, and she married a white, rich
Jew and just kind of lived a different it went
a different path. And so a Trump had these comments
in July, Democrats blew them up but again, the only
people who might actually be influenced by that are probably
the African American voters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would say this, this kind of takes
us back to the McDonald's point, because if you really,
you know, you mentioned the whole like socialist angle of
at the working class socialist angle policy kind of thing,
I would say it would probably be even more of
an identity thing, racial identity thing. If you were you
were wanted to like, you know, shore up your bona
fides as this humble origins black woman trying to make
it you know, in America, you would say, yeah, I
worked at McDonald's, and I suppose, I mean, she has
always kind of talked about Howard University Historical Black College
here in Washington, d C. But she didn't talk really
much about the McDonald thing. And I think to your point,
that whole that whole line from Trump was meant to
just like the birther thing was Obama. It had nothing
to do with really like race, the superficial concept of race.
He was. He was raising it, as you know, to
reinforce the idea that she's just someone who makes things
up depending on what she thinks her what's expedient, politically expedient.
So I went to her authenticity. I did. And as
you just said, him saying black, what he meant was
African American, because there's obviously the difference between Black Americans
who like have roots in like slavery in America versus
you know, a Jamaican or you know someone like like
from from Nigeria or something like that. You know, so
there is there is that distinction that he was not
very careful to make, or if you want to, I don't
know about careful, but he just wasn't very specific about
it in ways that I think were not super helpful.
But he was also in front of which is this
was the point I was making at the time when
he made that comment. He was in front of the
National Association of Black Journalists NABJ. Always try to like,
remember what the acronym is, and now that sounds like
it's going to be this cross section of black journalists
representing black issues that are important in black communities around
the country. That is not what the Association of Black
Journalists is. That is the typical liberal MSNBC, Washington Post
version of a black person in America, which is like
a Jonathan k part An, April Ryan, just like absolute
flaming liberal Democrats, left wing Democrats who they've got the
their their interests have nothing to do with representing black
voters in America. It's literally just feeding into the narratives
of Washington, DC, reinforcing what you see in the New
York Times, reinforcing what you see on MSNBC and CNN.
If you want black journal you would have had Stephen A.
Smith there talking with Donald Trump. That's someone who or
Charlemagne the God who. I mean, we're getting a little
bit loose here, but you would have those are the
two people I would trust to interview Donald Trump in
ways that, you know, pierce through issues that have something
to do with and relate to black voters around the country. Instead,
you had the woman from ABC, you had a couple others.
Had you did have what's her name something, Harris from
from Fox News's who's a fine journalist as well, Harris Fauner,
Harris Faulkner. Yeah, sorry, but you know, otherwise he's speaking
in front of you. Might you could replace that entire
audience with just the m s NBC lineup of primetime.
That's what's going on there. But I think again, going
back to his idea that like his assertion that well,
suddenly she decided to be black. Well okay, yeah, suddenly
she talks about working at McDonald's as well. That's true.
I mean I would say that it's a little bit,
it's not quite. Again, Trump was not very specific. She
has talked about being black. He's just he was trying
to say that she's not this African American and that's
who democrats rely on. Suddenly she's playing up that angle.
You know, they had that I don't know what they
called it. It was the hip hop barbecue or something that
they had at the Vice President's residence that was meant
to shore up black voters, like African American black voters,
of which she is not an African American not, So
she's leaning into that identity, just as you said the same.
I think it's the same thing with the McDonald's thing.
I don't even know if that's a class thing so
much as it is her trying to identify with lower income,
working class black voters.
Speaker 1: Right. But since we're on the identity politics, we've got
to talk about Kavanaugh. The end of this book, where
she talks about the kavanaugh confirmation process is simply amazing
in all the worst ways. And she goes on to
talk about how Christine Bozzi Forward is brave, and how
Brett Kavanaugh was such a disastrous nominee, and how it
was so horrible to have someone with that type of
character being a federal judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice,
and it just again just putting this book in the
context of the time. This was published in twenty nineteen,
so it's a lot closer to those events, but now
that we're just so far removed, and after our boss
balling Himingway published a book on this, it was just
so incredible to read over how leftists approached that nomination
again six years removed from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right, that was a pretty phenomenal fortunate because
it was basically at the very end, right or the
tail end of the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was. It was like the last.
Speaker 2: Topic she touched on, right, which was such a such
a wild topic to close on, because I mean, maybe
democrats still do. And when I say democrats, I'm not
referring to leadership in Congress here. I think they all
know they were lying. I'm just thinking about like the
average Democrat voted do they really have Are they really
still wedded to the idea that Christine Blasi Ford was
this this star courageous break. I mean, maybe the people
who watch the view still think that, but I just
I listened to it and was like, Wow, you're really
you're really going to re litigate this And and like
you said, we were when the book came out, it
was a little bit closer to that time, so maybe
the ashes hadn't quite burned out about what was going on.
But hearing it from now in twenty twenty four, now
that we one he's sitting Supreme Court Justice two, the
whole storyline was not even just like it would it
would be. It would it would do too much credit
to the whole affair to say that it was thoroughly
rebuked and discredited. It was more like how absurd and
ridiculous and offensive the affair was that has been exposed
just through the hearings, through the unraveling of and it
didn't take much to get to to unravel her story.
She didn't have any Christine Blasi Ford didn't have was
was not a credible witness, was not someone who was consistent.
She said she talked about things that were easily like,
this does not square with what you said. Not only
does it not square, there's no way for me to
actually fact check that.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And that's that's in the best case scenarios. You couldn't
fact check it. In the worst case, which was more
often not than not, you could fact check it, or
you could compare it to things she had said elsewhere
in her story or at previous times when she told
the story, and they didn't match. And so the way
that Kamala Harris in this book is retelling it, relitigating
it in earnest and thinking she's making a good point
or a strong point, going out on a strong note.
I mean, I remember that that was when during those hearings,
that was when she kind of became this this this
hero among Democrats, just because her performance was just so
stern and scolding, which is a theme throughout the book,
by the way, So many of the scenes that she
portrays is just her scolding somebody, whether it's like bank
executives or other Democrats who don't seem to care as
much as she does. Her calling John Kelly late at
night on at his home, you know, just scolding. It's
just constant scolding. And I suppose that what that's what
made her somewhat of a star among Democrats. But yeah,
it was a very bizarre note to go out for
this book about about on a topic that, in my
view and I think in your view, has been so
thoroughly exposed as just this absurd, sordid affair. Well, she
lionizes Christine Blasi Ford.
Speaker 1: In this book. I mean, it's it's it's about as
sycophantic as as as a leftist could be. She talks
about her, how her bravery is courageous, and how doctor
Ford was so you know, break but you talked about
how she contradicted herself. You know, contradictions are one thing,
but these are not minute contradictions. I mean, Molly was
pretty on this in the book. She could never Rozzie Ford,
could never prove that she and Kavanaugh he had even
ever met in college, And she didn't even have any
friends come up and corroborate her stories, and so she
had no one corroborating her. And then of course she
had she had contradictions. And of course I'm just going
to read straight from the book. Kamala Harris writes, and
again this is only a year later. It's not you
know where we are now. But she writes, quote, like
many Americans, I am still processing what our country has
been through. What about what Brett Kavanaugh went through? But
of course this is a California senator who is building
her political capital to run for president on the back
of this federal judge who has your reputation, by the way,
by just that everybody he's interacted with of the highest integrity.
But she is building her legacy on the me Too
movement to run for president. And it's just one of
the most disgraceful things in the book. And it's just
amazing to me that she ends with.
Speaker 2: This, yeah, and this is what democrats do. The way
you read from the book was she phrases it what
this country has been through. No, no, no, this is what
you put the country through. It's the samedynamic. When you
see news stories that are frames like Biden is still
struggling with inflation. Biden is grappling with multiple on multiple fronts.
He's struggling with the border. No no, no, Biden is the struggle.
He's the one who created the inflation problem. I mean,
and I the previous administration. Trump bears some responsibility, but
certainly it would have Trump Biden came in and just
poured kerosene on the fire, made it so much worse
than it had to be opened the border he did that.
He's the problem. The same thing with Kamala Harris for
her to say that what we went through, no, you
dragged us through that you made the whole thing this
should have been. And I remember I wish i'd written
it down or at least tweeted it somewhere when Kavanaugh
was nominated, and you could see just the immediate struggle
in the media to get anything that they could say
because he had worked in the Bush White House and
he had here's like you know that, and none of
it was going anywhere. It was all so weak. And
I remember I said it in the office when I
worked at the Washington Examiner at the time. I just
didn't write it anywhere, which I wish I had, but
I wrote barring some kind of me too thing, he's
going to sail through. And then of course there was
a me too thing. That was the one thing they
could that they could do, and I knew that was
going to happen, and they did it. But you know,
even even with the accusation, there could have been saying
Democrats that said, you know, I can't there's not enough
here for me to go through. But they get up
there on the dais in the Judiciary Committee and challenge
him on drinking, what his drinking habits when he was
like twenty years old? Did you ever drink to the
point of blacking out or where you don't remember? How
many beers? Would you say? You have a way? Just
like a really stupid, stupid, intrusive like so beside the
point lines of questioning, and again just like all around
offensive and speaking real quick. And I don't know if
we were ever going to touch on this, and I
don't I don't want to skip. I don't want to
change the subject. But just speaking of Kamala getting on
the Judiciary comedy, I had commented on this to you
where there's a scene where because she was going to
succeed Barbara Boxer in California in the Senate, and she says,
there's a part in the book where she's talking about
I guess what committee she wants to serve on. So
she she notices this is Kamala Harris. She says, I
noticed that there was an opening on the Intel Committee,
and I asked Barbara Boxer why there's that opening, and
Barbara Boxer told me, well, it's it's it's kind of
like low key work, like you don't get you don't
get a lot of press for it, you don't get it,
which I mean, it's insane to me because eventually, and
you said this to me, like yeah, like she, I'm
sure she knew that actually the entire Trump presidency would
be all about the Intel Committee and Russia interference, all
that kind of stuff. And that's exactly what happened. But
not only that, if even if assuming like so, Kamala says, oh, well,
that's exactly what I wanted. I didn't care about the cameras.
I didn't care about the spotlight. I just wanted to
do the hard work. And it's so laughable because she
already was going to be on the Judiciary Committee, which
amant any Supreme Court nominations. Those were going to be
like absolute bloody brawls with cameras for weeks, and so
the idea that she was just like, you know, this
wallflower who just wanted to keep her head down and
get to the hard work and on the Intel Committee.
Speaker 1: Absurd speaking of the Intelligence Committee. This is where I
think this was like the biggest fit of irony throughout
the entire book, where Kamala Harris is like the og
election denier. I think I'm just going to read this
whole passage in the book because it's just it is
striking when I heard it in the car, because I thought,
if these words came out of the mouth of a Republican,
we would never hear the end of it. Liz Cheney
would be posting them verbatim all over Twitter. You'd have
adamkinsing you're crying about them on CNN. So there's this
part of the book on the chapter on security where
she talks about the committee's May twenty eighteen report on
Russian interference in the twenty sixteen election, and she writes
all about how the voting systems were insecure and how
our elections are vulnerable to interference by especially foreign actors.
But here's the passage she wrote, in our report, we
raised concerns about a number of potential vulnerabilities that remain
in our election infrastructure. Voting systems are outdated, and many
of them do not have a paper record of votes.
Without a paper record, there is no way to reliably
audit a vote tally and confirm that numbers haven't been changed.
We found that thirty states used paperless voting machines in
some jurisdictions, and that five states use them exclusively, leaving
them vulnerable to a manipulation that cannot be reconciled and reversed.
We also found that any of our election systems are
connected to the Internet, leaving them open to hacking. Even
systems not regularly connected to the Internet are nevertheless outdated
by software that must be downloaded from the Internet. Imagine
that coming from Donald Trump when any Republican and from
the administration over the past four years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that entire section, I think there's even a
you might have read it because it reminded me of
this part, So maybe that was maybe you hit it.
But she did say something like in the book, like
so we weren't able to find any evidence of it,
but of like Russians changing votes, but we do know
that they access certain machines. And then I guess, like
that probably what you probably read the passage I was
exactly that I was thinking of, because then yeah, she
goes into how there were places where we didn't have
paper ballots to cross reference. So the whole purpose is
just to create doubt about the election and whether it's
was legitimately elected and to leave open the possibility that
he never should have been president. That's like the whole thing.
And that was, of course the whole thing that Democrats
did during during the Trump years, especially immediately after. Was
it no less by Hillary Clinton saying the election was
not on the level I think Nancy Pelosi herself saying
this is not a legitimate president. Yeah, And you didn't
have them, You didn't have Meet the Press, you didn't
have this week on ABC George Stephanopolis. You didn't have
any of these people bringing these Democrats on and saying, so,
are you ready to say that Trump won the twenty
sixteen election? Will you say that he is the sitting
president right now? And yet every Republican after Biden was
elected had to say the magic words that Joe Biden
is the president. He is the you know, legitimately elected president.
They had to say those words otherwise the conversation couldn't
go anywhere else. They had to stay on that. You
didn't have the media doing that with Democrats and then
you know, there's Kamala Harrison, her campaign book, blueprint for
what she's going to talk about in her campaign for president,
just leaving it open the idea that, you know, maybe
maybe he wasn't and maybe he was never supposed to
be president, maybe our systems were hacked by Russia and
they installed him. You know the fact that she just
gets to say something like that in her book and
we'll never talk about it again other than on this podcast.
The media is never going to talk about that again.
Speaker 1: Well, they never mentioned it during the January six stuff.
I mean, I remember covering that committee and talking about
how there had not been a single election won by
Republicans since nineteen eighty eight, that Democrats had not objected
to an electoral certification, and they did it in two thousand,
two thousand and four to twenty sixteen. Obviously, And of
course now Republicans are written off as the election deniers
who are trying to her mind election integrity. Of course,
Stacy Abrams always comes to mind in twenty eighteen when
she refused to acknowledge that she had lost that race
in Georgia. And so I can almost guarantee no matter
which party wins, in November. You're, first of all, I
think we're gonna have problems in the selection probably. I mean,
you're just I don't think we've fixed all the zuck
box issues. And Democrats have gotten so smart at smart
at the game here and so but I can guarantee
Republicans win in November. You're going to have an avalanche
of Democrat litigation challenging this election in the courts on
Capitol Hill. And you know, this era of elections uncontested now,
I think our elections are so sloppy now that I
think that era is just long gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean twenty twenty kind
of changed everything, and then for some reason now it
just takes forever to get certain places in a There's
always the places that are the most suspects, like what's
going on there? Why is this taking you so long?
What is it you're waiting for? Like why was everybody
else able to get their votes in? And I understand
the idea that they're like, especially the Democrat the big
metropolitan metropolitan areas, they've got more votes to count. But
if there are more votes to count, you should have
You would think larger voting centers, more voting machines and
more volunteers. That's just the way math works. You've got
more people voting, but you also have more people working
the polls, so you know these places where it takes forever. Now,
I'm trying to think if I mean that we had
some slow stuff going on in Florida in twenty what
was that two thousand, especially when they had the pregnant
chads And it's probably really that's way back for your memory,
I would think. But you know, there were all sorts
of issues that we saw, but none where it was
as widespread like here. It's like an Arizona swing state
Georgia that we're now told is the swing state Pennsylvania,
like it's Wisconsin. It's all the places that Democrats. Absolutely,
they're the ones that rely on those places that if
they can't win them, their their chance gets just so
small and actually winning a national election for the president.
So no, I don't think we fixed anything, and I
I for sure, I mean, we're already we've already seen it.
I remember saying this several months ago that the deep
fake thing not deep fake ai A. I think I
think it's happened in the opposite way. Then, I thought
it was going to happen. I thought it was going
to be Trump was going like things were going to
happen with that looked bad for Trump, that were in
fact going to be a I. And the media was
going to say, well, we don't know, but they're sure.
They're exposing everyone to it, but they're saying we don't know.
The Trump campaign saying it's AI, but we don't know,
but they are AI. Right, That's what I thought. And
then and then conversely, I thought real things were going
to happen, and I guess it did happen this way.
Real things were going to happen involving Biden that the
media was going to say was AI. And actually that
did happen because remember there were the videos of him
stumbling around and fumbling and looking lost, and then the
media was saying those were deep fakes. They were repeating
the White House staying there were deep fakes. I think
that that's going to continue. And then I really and
this this one really does scare me. Is this this
this technicality of I don't know what kind it's going
to be, but it's gonna this This has been used
against Trump multiple times in the past, including in twenty
sixteen during the Republican primary, there's gonna be some technicality
that's like, oh, you know what, this box wasn't checked.
He actually can't be president. He actually is not even
supposed to be on the ballots in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, in Michigan. Wow,
you know what? Actually, and it's too late, Like I
totally see some secretary of state because they're sued by
some liberal activist group that something like that is gonna happen.
So just some technicality that is like this whole thing
is completely wrong and actually he's invalid. I I see
something like that on the horizon, and that one's scares
me more than anything.
Speaker 1: Right, right, Well, Eddie, I think those were all the
topics that I had outlined. There's any other topics that
you had talk about. But if not, what else are
you reading?
Speaker 2: You ask me what I'm reading. I'm not much of
a reader, so I somewhat I've seen it. I am
a reader. I'm not much of a book reader. So
you wrapping me into this assignment where I listened to
the book, so that helped, but I enjoyed it. It
was all right. Otherwise I'm always just reading the New
York Times and Politico and Axios in the Washington Post
and Twitter poisoning my mind with CNN and MSNBC. The
last thing I'll note on the on the book, because
she seems very fond of this story of election night
twenty sixteen, so that would have been her election. Also
Donald Trump's where and you've made fun of it too,
Oh gosh.
Speaker 1: The derita skin.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the detail that she has mentioned more than
once that I do not understand why she thinks this
is either funny or relatable. I'm actually not. I'm not
sure if it's supposed to be humorous. But she says
she ate a whole bag of Dorito's while sitting there
listening to the the election results come in, and she
makes sure to say like it's the scene is supposedly
like a bunch of family sitting around with her, which
I mean, I believe it. I don't think it's made up.
But she she mentions the doritos, and I don't remember
she says what flavor she's had or not, I'd be curious,
but she mentions the dorito's and then says, I didn't
share one single chip with anybody. I honestly that goes
back to my point where I think she sets herself
up for either something that's supposed to be relatable or
charming or even strong, make herself look impressive, when in
fact you just hear it and you think, what WTF, Like,
what are you talking about? And why did you think
that was important to say? Do you have any do
you have any read on that? Why she what is
the story? And why does she tell it? Well?
Speaker 1: As actually I have it opened in the book right here,
I'll just I'll read straight from it. It's like three sentences.
No one really knew what to say or do. Each
of us was trying to cope in our own way.
I sat down on the couch with Doug and ate
an entire family bag of classic Doritos, didn't share a
single chip, And I think it was media he did this.
But one of the news organizations reported on that, and
they used like an AI feature photo. It's like this
picture of Kamala Harris, like almost like she's like sniffing
out of the bag of chips, and just that visual
was just striking.
Speaker 2: Okay, well so, but at least we got to the bottom.
It's classic. So I'm guessing that cheese flavor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think I think that's a classic flavor.
I mean, I mean, cool ranch is popular, but I
think that was like a side flavor. Yeah yeah, all right,
well glad, We're glad we discussed it. Well, Eddie, thank
you for joining me. You've been listening to another edition
of the Federal Stradio Hour. I'm Tristan Justine. The Same
will be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers
with freedom and anxious for the Fray.