Politics

‘Trust the experts’ is the battle cry of America’s elitists. After President Trump’s shock election in 2016 showed that Americans are sick of hearing from politicians, the politicized classes adopted experts as their proxy for power. Climate change ‘experts’ justify AOC’s radical Green New Deal with prophecies of planetary extinction. Foreign policy ‘experts’ claim America will destabilize the Middle East if, as Trump wants, we withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Medical ‘experts’ are wheeled out to justify increasing control over the lives of everyday Americans through draconian lockdowns, mask mandates and stringent travel restrictions.

Mike Pompeo has ‘every reason to believe’ director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe’s assessment that the recent story about Hunter Biden and his emails is not the product of Russian disinformation. https://twitter.com/jseldin/status/1318933935007633410 'I have every reason to believe he's got it exactly right,' the secretary of state said during a Wednesday press briefing in response to a question from The Spectator. The New York Post's report contains emails purportedly from Hunter Biden in which he discusses setting up meetings between foreign business associates and vice president Joe Biden.

The most under-appreciated fact of the 2020 presidential campaign is that Kamala Harris, the woman likely to soon replace the geriatric Biden should the Democratic ticket win, is a creature of San Francisco political machine. Harris was born 56 years ago today in Berkeley, the daughter of two graduate students, and spent her formative years in the East Bay. She attended Howard University where she learned nothing about rap, returning to the Bay Area afterwards. Her political career took off after an affair with then California State Assembly Speaker, and the future mayor of San Francisco, and the City’s powerbroker, Willie Brown. Brown was twice her age at the time, and his wife was battling cancer.

Sigmund Freud famously noted that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. In the case of fracking, even Freud would have acknowledged that fracking is about so much more than just fracking. That is why the issue is so important to voters beyond those in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas where so much oil and natural gas is produced. That is also why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have tried to walk back their positions on fracking from the Democratic primary, when they said they’d ban fracking and cease the use of carbon-based energy sources, as well as push for the budget-busting and progressive utopian Green New Deal. Of course, it’s about jobs.

Trump hatred has been with us since he announced his candidacy five years ago. But we can all feel the escalating fever pitch of fury that has marked the weeks leading up to the election. In social settings, friends of otherwise sound temperament seem uncharacteristically uncontrolled in their visceral rage when referring to the President. Just mention his name and you'll be interrupted with 'Oh I hate him, he's a sociopath' or the requisite 'If he wins, I swear I'm moving out of the country!'The question, I always wonder, is why this intense level of revulsion? It is so deep, so impervious to reasoned discussion. Policy differences can’t account for this level of skin crawling. The conversation is really never about SALT deductions or fracking. Even abortion is of secondary concern.

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called ‘closet Trump’ voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories. Columbus, Ohio I am a conservative Republican woman and my Christian faith is the foundation of my family. My faith is constantly under attack by Democrats.

Long before her Senate confirmation hearings, we knew Judge Amy Coney Barrett was smart. A Supreme Court clerkship and prolific career in the legal academy added up to someone uncommonly capable of hard work. That she is Catholic with seven kids — the ‘dogma lives loudly in her’, to borrow Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s immortal slur — is well known. What we didn’t expect was the hearing’s greatest surprise: Judge Barrett is normal.That is no minor relief in an America that increasingly seems a little unhinged. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse came to the Senate floor bearing an incomprehensible series of partially hand-scrawled charts, like a conspiracy theorist storming a town hall.

This year’s presidential election may see a new pattern that may prove disastrous for the GOP. Former vice president Joe Biden appears on track to win an impressive share of the oldest voters, without losing support among the young.The relationship between age and political party preference is not linear, but for many election cycles older voters have been, on average, more Republican than younger voters. According to exit polls, in 2016 voters age 65 and older gave Donald Trump 52 percent of their votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 56 percent of this cohort.The correlation between age and vote choice gives the Democrats a compelling narrative.

Res ipse loquitur. What a card Joe Biden is. Here he is to Fox News a year ago: 'I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.' Ha, ha, ha. Peter Schweizer exploded that bald faced lie in his film Riding the Dragon and elsewhere. And just today the New York Post prints an email captured from Hunter Biden’s computer. It’s from a Ukrainian businessman named Vadym Pozharskyi, who in 2015 was an adviser to Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat. Hunter had no experience in the energy sector. But his dad was vice president of the United States and apparently that was worth the $50,000 per month that Hunter collected in fees.

White House coronavirus task force member Dr Scott Atlas said during a Tuesday interview with The Spectator there was 'no fair basis' for canceling this week's presidential debate between President Trump and Joe Biden following the President's coronavirus diagnosis. 'The debate absolutely should have been able to continue. Honestly, I think there is no fair basis for canceling that debate — none,' Atlas said. Trump and Biden were scheduled to meet for the second time on the debate stage on Thursday in a town-hall style event moderated by Steve Scully. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced last week, without agreement between the two campaigns, that the debate would be conducted virtually due to health concerns raised by the President contracting the virus.