ANALYSIS
Ben Johnson September 11, 2024
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
Presidential debates have often been compared to professional wrestling matches, but the ABC News debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris more closely resembled a handicap match, with Trump taking on three opponents at once: Harris and both moderators.
As “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir and ABC News Live “Prime” anchor Linsey Davis regularly fact-checked Trump in real time, they allowed Harris to get by with numerous evasions and false statements on such issues as late-term abortions, post-birth executions, government pregnancy monitors, the economy, and haggard canards about “very fine people” at Charlottesville.
Here are a few of Harris’ misstatements that the ABC News moderators let her get away with.
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Harris attempted to deny Trump’s charge that the Democratic Party supports late-term abortion by denying such abortions take place. “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion,” Harris dodged.
In reality, 21 states allow abortion until birth: Six states have no legal limit protecting unborn children, and the rest allow abortion after the point of viability thanks to a vague and expansive “health of the mother” exception.
Late-term abortions are well-documented. In 2022, pro-life advocates found the remains of five babies whom abortionist Cesare Santangelo aborted late in their term or possibly after birth at the Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, D.C. The Biden-Harris Justice Department advised the District of Columbia to destroy the evidence.
“In 2013, New Mexico abortionist Shelley Sella faced medical board sanctions after she committed an abortion on a child at 35 weeks,” reports Carole Novielli of Live Action. “In 2003, abortionist Charles Rossmann gave abortion pills to a woman who was past 30 weeks.” Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque’s website advertised that “abortion services are available through 32 weeks. Exceptions after 32 weeks are provided on a case-by-case basis.”
A 1981 Philadelphia Inquirer article documented that, in abortion facilities, “unintended live births are literally an everyday occurrence,” but they are “hushed up” instead of treated as “a problem to be solved.”
More than 56,000 abortions took place after 21 weeks, according to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.
PHILADELPHIA, PA – Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris faced off in a heated debate Tuesday night, sparring about abortion, immigration, Israel, the economy and a range of other issues—but Trump also battled the ABC News moderators, who were quick to challenge and “fact check” the 45th president, while leaving Harris’ numerous distortions untouched.
Trump and Harris engaged in their first, and possibly only debate of the 2024 general election cycle at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pa. Tuesday night—a highly-anticipated ninety-minute showdown as they traded jabs, and repeatedly, accused each other of lying.
The two met for the first time Tuesday night on the debate stage, with the vice president introducing herself as “Kamala Harris” to the former president as they shook hands–before making it a top priority to attempt to get under his skin and bait him throughout the debate.
The debate got underway with questions from ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis, who challenged Trump throughout the debate.
Shortly after it concluded, Trump told Fox News Digital that he thought it was his “best debate ever, especially because it was three on one.”
Moderators began with the economy—first questioning the vice president on whether Americans “are better off than they were four years ago?”
Harris did not directly respond to the question. The Biden-Harris administration has seen rising inflation.
Instead, Harris incorrectly claimed Trump wanted to introduce a “sales tax” on everyday goods, but Trump dismissed that claim as an “incorrect statement.”
Moderators chimed in, suggesting Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on other countries would pass on higher costs to consumers.
But Trump countered, pointing to the high inflation of the Biden-Harris administration, calling it the “worst in our nation’s history,” while touting the record-economy under his administration.
Trump went on to hit Harris on her lack of clear policies, saying her past record and “everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window.”
“She’s going to my philosophy now,” he said. “In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat.”
Dr. John Lott, Jr.: 94% of Mass Public Shootings Occur in Places Where Guns are banned. Plus, a dozen other statistics that shatter anti-gun myths.
Dr. Lott is the author of More Guns Less Crime (2019) and other books and many academic articles on crime, guns, and much more. A few seconds over 7-minutess, this video demolishes Democrat Party efforts to ban or severely limit gun ownership.
VIDEO
https://youtu.be/4pWkLS-h424?si=DLdoEga74Afqm_Qc
I previously wrote how a Harris-Walz Administration would be a nightmare for free speech. Both candidates have shown pronounced anti-free speech values. Now, X owner Elon Musk and former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have posted a Harris interview to show the depths of the hostility of Harris to unfettered free speech. I have long argued that Trump and the third-party candidates should make free speech a central issue in this campaign. That has not happened. Kennedy was the only candidate who was substantially and regularly talking about free speech in this election. Yet, Musk and Kennedy are still trying to raise the chilling potential of a Harris-Walz Administration.
In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how the Biden-Harris Administration has proven to be the most anti-free speech administration since John Adams. That includes a massive censorship system described by one federal judge as perfectly “Orwellian.”
In the CNN interview, Harris displays many of the anti-free speech inclinations discussed earlier. She strongly suggests that X should be shut down if it does not yield to demands for speech regulation.
What is most chilling is how censorship and closure are Harris’s default positions when faced with unfettered speech. She declares to CNN that such unregulated free speech “has to stop” and that there is a danger to the country when people are allowed to “directly speak[] to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.”
Harris discussed her view that then-President Trump’s Twitter account should be shut down because the public had to be protected from harmful viewpoints.
“And when you’re talking about Donald Trump, he has 65 million Twitter followers, he has proven himself to be willing to obstruct justice – just ask Bob Mueller. You can look at the manifesto from the shooter in El Paso to know that what Donald Trump says on Twitter impacts peoples’ perceptions about what they should and should not do.”
Harris is not so much a flip-flopper as a padder, who supports anything, without any worry about framing each new position by renouncing her original and opposite one.
An Opportunistic Mediocrity
In theory, it should be hard for Kamala Harris to win the presidency of the United States.
Under pressure, Harris just completed her first “live interview”—a disastrous performance that was mysteriously taped, edited, and emotionally supported by her co-interviewed running mate. During the interview, she claimed that her values remain the same even though her manifestations of them have admittedly changed. Translated, that means for the next 70 days, she will advocate for popular policies antithetical to her own values, which will inevitably resurface after the election once the current façade fades away.
She is a Berkelyite who, as attorney general of California, had a proud far-left tenure. The lifelong large corpus of Harris’s left-wing enthusiasm and causes are only now being unearthed. But they are singular in that her riffs of embracing wokism, being a radical, erasing ICE, doing away with private health insurance, or being the last person in the room when Joe Biden made his disastrous decisions were all given to sympathetic media or pandered to crowds.
As a result, she often doubled down. Her emphatic statements were intended to stun audiences. Unlike other leftists, she really was a proud woke, radical and wanted everyone else to be one as well—broadcasting her leftism as openly as she is now cloaking it.
In one respected survey, Harris’s voting record was rated as the most left-leaning in the United States Senate. If she voted to the left of the admitted hardcore socialist Bernie Sanders, what exactly does that make her?
Otherwise, Harris was undistinguished, and often overtly so, as she was exposed as inane in Senate hearings. Her envisioned 2019-2020 primary bid proved an utter disaster. When liberal Democrat voters nationwide were first made aware of her radical record, her left-wing agendas, and her weird wash/rinse/spin word-salad chats, they ran.
The whole idea behind this stupid science fiction project is that a company called Summit Carbon Solutions will build pipelines that originate at methane plants across the Midwest. They will “capture” the CO2 emissions from these plants and then transport them in the pipelines. Once the CO2 reaches its destination, it will be compressed and then permanently stored in massive underground vaults.
CO2 is also known as “plant food,” by the way. They’re going to store this naturally occurring gas in massive underground vaults forever as if it’s dangerous radioactive waste or something. Once again—there is no economic benefit to anyone from this project, other than Summit Carbon Solutions.
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