Apparently, Kamala Harris needs your vote so she can fix all the problems she did nothing to address during the four years of the Biden-Harris administration. Expect her to do her best in the months ahead to elide the difference between Trump and Biden, too, as if she’s the fresh, suddenly-outta-nowhere solution to the (vague generalized old white male) mess both men embody. Left-liberals know how to bet—and win—on the public not paying attention or having any memories.
Like a quantum candidate, she’s now also simultaneously someone who was never the unofficial border czar (if she’s addressing someone who’s looking to cast blame) but also more welcoming of immigrants (if you like immigrants and hate Trump’s wall) and yet tougher and more eager to crack down on immigration than Trump has ever dreamt of being (if you’re an immigration-wary moderate in a swing state like Arizona).
Unburdened not just by the immediate past (such as earlier parts of the sentence she’s uttering) but even by the present, she’ll be whatever you need her to be if it gets her elected—and then you’ll get it good and hard regardless, like the innocents she knowingly kept in prison, except now the prison will be America.
Don’t expect her to stick to any promises along the way. As she once said, laughing, when asked about her own harsh condemnations of Biden when the two were briefly rivals in the 2020 primary: it was just a campaign remark! Ha ha ha!
It makes perfect sense she’d pick as her v.p. running mate the shifty, truth-challenged, stocky Tim Walz, who looks for all the world like late Toronto mayor Rob Ford hoping no one finds his crack stash, crossed with Nikita Khrushchev telling the workers how grateful they should be for the new tractor factory.
It seems as if the Democrats are gambling there won’t be enough time before election day arrives to acquaint the public with all the nonsense and contradictions in Walz’s record, and the Democrats are probably right. The media won’t be helping inform the public, after all.
If they were, they could surely build interesting stories about how Walz’s idea of being a nice guy apparently leaves room for getting a DUI after driving nearly twice the speed limit in a 55 zone; how Walz’s conception of “neighborliness” was probably honed during long stretches with actual communists as his neighbors while he was living in China (he says, “Never shy away from our Progressive values: one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness”); or how Walz’s idea of military service is to bail on his regiment as they were being deployed so he could go run for Congress.
On that last point, the media are trying to shift attention to Republican v.p. candidate Vance’s military tenure, suggesting it doesn’t count because he was in the public relations department, as if that shocks the media’s own sensibilities. Maybe they’re jealous because that means Vance qualifies for a gig at CNN.
But then, is there all that much difference between conquering Iraq and staying home to subjugate the people of the U.S. via legislative activity anyway? I’d abolish both of Walz’s evil loves, the welfare state and the warfare state, if it were up to me.
Walz would likely act horrified by that agenda, as if only a hard-hearted meanie would pursue it, but newsflash: the Midwestern aw-shucks soft-sell doesn’t make con artists any less evil. The quiet, easygoing tones make them more like Thrawn, the whispering-yet-sociopathic Imperial grand admiral from the Star Wars TV shows—or worse, a bit like Minnesotan snooze-inducer Garrison Keillor.
It’s all passive-aggressive—a palpable, pent-up, veiled longing for power‚ which is more annoying and less moral than being just-plain-aggressive, justifiably tired though the U.S. may be of more blatantly bullying demeanors such as Trump’s.
I’m reminded there are somehow about five unrelated movies with titles closely resembling The Good Neighbor, each of them roughly about a normal-seeming, stealthy creep-next-door plotting to kill our protagonist. The media can pretend we’re all instantly in love with Walz, but would you really want him showing up at your farmhouse door on a winter night? He’s got a high tolerance for horror, too, having accidentally voted for healthcare for babies born alive after botched abortions and then consciously reversed his vote when he realized the initial vote might have pro-life implications.
On other health matters, he’s not so enamored of choice, and it appears from leaked e-mails that his staff while he was governor consciously exaggerated Covid impact numbers, not to achieve what they thought would be greater accuracy but simply to better justify the draconian lockdowns they were already pursuing. Power now, truth whenever.
Yet the media are now falling over themselves trying to make Walz sound cool—and joyous! so joyous!—because he’s bought records by Minnesota rock bands and has been to a Hold Steady concert, the Hold Steady being about as grim and joyless a band as I’ve heard, a bit like Randy Newman if he were more bitter and had his sense of humor removed.
I’ve been to an Elvis Costello concert or two and happen to have written about seeing Morrissey in my column last week, but it doesn’t mean you should vote for me. Do my political views override Walz’s if I’ve seen cooler bands than he has? And don’t believe Walz is an across-the-board free spirit. Challenged in an interview with the contention that censorship is bad, Walz said, “we need to push back on this” and explained there’s no constitutional guarantee of free speech for hate speech or misinformation “especially around our democracy.” He is absolutely, objectively wrong about the law on that point.
It’s all enough to make one wish Harris and the Democrats had shown more interest in pandering to Pennsylvania or Jewish voters and thus picked Josh Shapiro as their v.p. candidate. But then, all Democrats are pretty awful. The now-obsolete Biden, lest we be tempted to start pitying or respecting him, said during the pandemic, with villainy comparable to Walz’s: “Milton Friedman is no longer calling the shots,” knowingly bashing the libertarian economics Nobelist, who would’ve understood how much damage can be done by regulations such as pandemic or (soon perhaps) climate lockdowns.
Yet there’s a bizarre subset of my fellow libertarians who are already planning to vote for the nightmarish Harris-Walz ticket, or at least are convinced the ticket is making some of the right moves to win libertarian votes.
Libertarian Ilya Somin argues that Harris is less authoritarian than Trump (things like her willingness to keep innocents in prison or to urge locking people up for school truancy violations notwithstanding, I suppose). Nicholas Sarwark thinks Walz took a big step toward winning over libertarians by (hypocritically) saying culture warriors should “mind their own business” (despite Walz doing things like urge people to call a government hotline if their neighbors violate Covid protocols). And Jacob Grier, even more absurdly, argues libertarians “should endorse Harris and Walz, not with reluctance but with genuine enthusiasm” because of Walz’s skepticism about cops and pro-lifers in contrast to autocratic Trump.
You needn’t plan to vote for Trump to think that praising or voting for Harris/Walz is the encouragement of tyranny. Some very opinionated people should try just keeping quiet and sitting on their hands during election time. And gosh darn it, it keeps ’em so toasty, too! Guffaw! You folks have fun!
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey