Welcome to Thunderdome. Last night, something that a month ago was unthinkable happened: Joe Biden announced from the Oval Office that he would stand down as his party’s nominee and pass the torch to a new generation of Democrats in Kamala Harris. The speech was blatantly political with the normal Jon Meacham high-school civics elements instead of sounding the type of deeply personal notes that marked the better aspects of Biden’s career. It was delivered with a world-weary tone, the old man being put out to pasture by a party and their media allies who deliberately chose to knife him at his weakest moment, despite lauding his achievements as historic for the past several years. It was all part of the deal: he gave the speech, the media became sycophantic once again, then they let him have ice cream. One final stop for the Great Commuter.

Joseph Epstein speaks in the WSJ for a lot of us who have known Joe Biden for a long time:

After more than fifty years in government, Mr. Biden has become the emblematic politician, which is no compliment. He came into office promising to heal the rifts dividing the country — and instead widened them by his own leftward political turn. He continues to call himself Catholic yet is blithely pro-choice on abortion. Everything about him — his ideas, his language, his very smile — seems fake.

The crazy thing is, he’s being replaced by someone even more fake than he is at this point. The message testing around the current veep is astounding for how garbled, overwritten and utterly malleable it is. So the level of gaslighting from the media and the Hollywood production staff tasked with this campaign sprint will have to be incredible — and it’s already showing itself in blatantly obvious ways.

Until fifteen minutes ago, the media readily acknowledged that Kamala Harris was far to the left of the country — note the first minute of this Norah O’Donnell interview as Harris first laughs off, then sits in stunned open-mouthed confusion as she’s confronted with the reality of her voting record. But this week the rating O’Donnell cited from GovTrack mysteriously just disappeared. And since it’s now a meaningful political liability instead of an act of scapegoating that one of Harris’s primary responsibilities was being tapped as “border czar” by Joe Biden, that has to get memory-holed, too. Already many of the same journalists, publications and networks who referred to Harris by that title now insist that it never happened — and they just never bother to correct themselves until right now. Soon enough, saying Kamala had any responsibility for the border crisis will be deemed Republican disinformation. You just misheard Joe Biden — maybe it was the mask.

Peter Savodnik followed up with Axios about this:

When I asked Mike Allen, Axios’s executive editor, what had prompted Axios to publish the follow-up article in the first place, he texted me back: “am sure there’ll be continuing conversation on this.” (Allen did not reply to a follow-up question about today’s article and editor’s note.)

There was something just more than a teensy bit Bolshevik about all of this. This piece of information that was once considered a fact — as in, a week ago — has in the past forty-eight hours been deemed politically unhelpful — and so we’re just going to make it… disappear…

It should be noted that all this is more than a little ridiculous, since no one in the United States government is technically a czar of anything. How does one “fact-check” that which is only an informal title? 

Nevertheless, it was an informal title widely used. Here’s the New York Times in 2021: “Ms. Harris will also soon be taking over work from a departing official with years of experience. Last week, Roberta S. Jacobson, the former ambassador to Mexico chosen as Mr. Biden’s ‘border czar,’ said that she would retire from government. She said she was happy to see Ms. Harris assume the work of stemming migration from Central America.” And here’s the Washington Post that same year, describing the vice president as taking on “the lead role on the overall border and regional issue.”  

Expect more like this in the weeks and months to come. What were Kamala Harris’s responsibilities in the Biden administration? Who knows? It’s a mystery! Whatever she did, you can assure yourself it was always good and never bad. Now let’s talk about how J.D. Vance hates cat ladies (more on that below).

A less important but somehow more devious bit of gaslighting came from the New York Times, which reports today on the surge of renewed interest in the show Veep, inaccurately framing it as somehow indicating a sympathetic view of Kamala Harris. It’s nothing of the sort. Selina Meyer represents exactly the kind of vapid, conniving, cruel girlboss who exists in politics to further an agenda that is utterly pointless beyond settling grudges and obtaining power for herself. The ultimate conclusion of her story is that she will sacrifice everything — her relationships, her family, her closest allies, her most dedicated supporters and in the end the only aide who truly loved her — to gain the presidency. Which she does, to basically no effect beyond occupying the job she always wanted.

Now, in the real world, Kamala Harris is trying to do the same thing — and all she had to do was go along with knifing the old man who never wanted to pick her anyway. At the moment, her party couldn’t be happier. We’ll see how long that honeymoon lasts if the memes don’t hit. The line about Kamala that one Democrat told me in 2015 still rings in my memory: “She’s a great first date.”

All the childless cat ladies

A year and a half ago, I wrote about a trend in conservative discourse — expressed most succinctly by J.D. Vance — going after the predominance of “childless cat ladies” running the country. It was a trend that stuck in my craw for a variety of reasons, particularly because it struck me as so deeply uncharitable and at odds with Christian understanding of relationships. When Vance was announced as the vice presidential nominee by Donald Trump, I expressed to colleagues my belief that it might eventually come up as an issue for their campaign. Little did I know it would so quickly vault into the center of the attacks on him from Democrats and the media, sensing with Kamala’s rise a way to personalize the issue for women across the country. Jennifer Aniston is out there today blasting Vance to her 50 million social media followers — clearly, Democrats sense an opportunity and we should expect them to be wearing “cat ladies for Kamala” gear soon enough.

The background, as reported by Semafor’s Dave Weigel, is here. Vance gave his initial remarks during his primary race at an ISI conference, then repeated them in an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, framing it as an indictment of the outsized role of childless professional-class Americans in our politics:

They live in one-bedroom apartments in New York City, they’ve played their entire lives to win a status game, they’re obsessed with their jobs, they’re obsessed with their wealth and with their fortunes and they look at middle America, people who are actually pretty happy with their lives and the choices that they’ve made and they hate normal Americans for choosing family over these ridiculous [Washington] DC and New York status games.

And I think because of that, they just get so angry when somebody calls it what it is. It’s acceptable when they ignore that, it never happens, but when somebody calls out that “Look, if you’re a miserable cat lady, you should not force your misery on the rest of the country,” they just get really upset about it.

Now, on the one hand, there’s a very valid critique of the left and western world leadership being so anti-family and anti-child. Motivated by fanaticism regarding climate change, the left’s baseless concern about overpopulation has driven them into the crazed position of actually hating babies.

The left also wants to supplant and replace the traditional family with the government: there’s absolutely truth to this — and the Democratic Party has been loudly declaring it for years. Conservatives see an atomized populace, full of vast masses of people bereft of social bonds, as a major risk to the republic — while the left sees it as an opportunity to further their agenda of a massive and intrusive welfare state. These are real differences and they shouldn’t be ignored.

The problem is Vance’s needlessly cruel rhetoric, which undermines a valid point by turning it into just “cat ladies.” It’s one thing to say “it’s good to have children, and it’s good to have the interests of families prioritized in our politics,” it’s another to just turn it into a misogynist cliché of “these pussy-hat wearing protesters, all old and dried up, they never found a man, look at your sad pathetic life.”

The reason this offends conservative women, too, shouldn’t be lost in this moment. Every Christian conservative woman who got married and had kids has that one friend who didn’t, who is pushing forty and looking back with regret at never finding someone or facing the approaching reality of never having kids. And sometimes it’s not one friend but a dozen. It also ignores the fact that this is a problem for men as well as women, with low-achieving boys left behind and higher achieving men having all the cachet necessary to turn this atomized big city professional existence into their personal harem.

If Vance is going to pivot on this issue, he needs to make it about optimism and hope, not judgment. There was a point just about five or six years ago where virtually every European leader was childless. France’s Macron, Germany’s Merkel, the UK’s May and Scotland’s Sturgeon, the PMs of Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Luxembourg and the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker had zero kids among them all. That’s not just weird; it’s the sign of a decrepit leadership of a continent with a noble past but a shrinking future. 

The climate cult of the eurocrats is the same motivation that drives Kamala Harris and her Green New Deal allies. They’ve made it more expensive to have families and kids not by accident, but intentionally. They promote abortion and depict kids as a nuisance and a barrier to happiness. They look down on people who have large families because they still believe the Malthusian myth about a destiny of famine, war and a planet of floods and fire. They have given up on the future. But people like Vance and his backers, from conservative Christians to heterodox billionaires like Elon Musk, who believe in the importance of having children? They have hope for the future. That’s the difference between the left and the right.

This a good contrast to make, if Vance has the communication capability to make it. He did write a bestseller, after all.

Who’s running the country now?

Joshua Trevino writes on the onset of the “Harris Presidency”:

This is the template for the full-tilt promotion and marketing reinvention of the vice president of the United States, who is now the president of the United States in all but name. This is why the proper description of the former president’s actions across the past week remain squarely in the rhetoric of coup and abdication: the former because this outcome was forced upon him by elements within the regime, and the latter because he retains no real power. Prior to midday Sunday, it was eminently possible to imagine policy and decisions emanating from the executive branch with which Joseph Biden agreed, and Kamala Harris did not. After sometime on Monday, and especially after yesterday’s declaration that her formal nomination is assured, that is simply impossible. All policy and power now orient toward her. It is the choice of the regime to be sure, but not the choice of those actually empowered to decide in the constitutional order.

Understand that this is not some lame-duck period well understood in American civics: George H.W. Bush running for president while Ronald Reagan still presides, for example. The qualitative difference now is that no previous president across two and half centuries of American history was ever publicly humiliated with back-to-back expositions of his own personal and political impotence in the way that President Biden has been. No previous president was ever positively compelled to exit public life and hand over his whole apparatus to his vice president. President Biden therefore retains the form of the office without the substance. The substance is fully in possession of the prime beneficiary of his fall. 

Kamala Harris is the de facto president of the United States. Why she is not in de jure possession of the office is a topic for speculation, befitting the opacity of this entire affair. We can guess that perhaps the Biden clique, down to its last holdouts, negotiated an exit on the condition that this final act in public life be the fiction of a dignified exit. (This is a problem for regime media, which went full-court on the narrative of his inability to hold office for the past thirty days, and now must endorse the opposite narrative for the remainder of the year, but one of its own making.) We can also guess that the various regime factions were unready to fully commit to the vice president, knowing well her disastrous record as a national figure, consistently unsteady and unpopular.

She knows they know it, which is why she and her own factions are rushing to terminate any uncertainties in a hurry, both with delegate pursuits and with a strange August “virtual” nomination nearly two weeks before the actual Democratic National Convention. The timing has a purpose: the Harris faction knows that if she cannot establish a plausibly competitive candidacy in national polling by the week of August 12, the DNC the following week has the potential to become genuinely deliberative and competitive. That’s the disaster scenario for her and for the regime — though not for what remains of the party’s popular base, which might actually benefit from a process they were effectively denied. 

The alert reader will contrast this with the state of the Republican Party, which regime media routinely asserts is now an authoritarian vehicle, yet somehow held a genuinely competitive primary process and selected its nominee entirely in public view. 

More on this from Matt Taibbi.

One more thing

I wrote earlier this week on why I think Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona would make the smartest pick for Kamala Harris’s VP — and apparently he’s climbing up the list behind the scenes. David Catanese reports: “Kelly’s stock rose further on Wednesday after he moved to allay the concerns of some union organizations, endorsing a bill that would expand labor protections and employee rights.” The rule has been that vice presidential choices rarely matter politically except as a negative — but as we’ve seen with Harris and Vance, these choices may be taking on new significance in an era of political upheaval. In 2024, our politics has seen things go from impossible and unprecedented to accepted reality in a matter of weeks. Things are changing fast — and we’ve still got more than 100 days to go.