Rob Schumacher / USA TODAY NETWO
Conservative: Harris’ ‘Dissonance’ With Catholics
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) had no idea her mock-communion Doritos video might offend Catholics — showing “how out of touch Democratic elites are,” roars The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. And such “cluelessness may prove costly” for Kamala Harris in November. It’s not just gaffes: As the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner recalls, Harris has “long used government power to try to coerce people of faith to violate their consciences.” Politico flags the “cultural dissonance” between her San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians. Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who talks about helping pregnant women who want to keep their babies. As Brian Burch of CatholicVote quips, Kennedy “is offering Democrats social permission” to vote Republican.
Ex-prosecutor: FBI’s ‘Enduring’ Pro-Joe Corruption
The enduring relevance of Hunter Biden’s “laptop is not as a Biden story, but as a story of the political corruption of the government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus,” grumbles Andrew McCarthy at Fox News. “The FBI took possession of the laptop in December 2019, and quickly authenticated it,” yet in the weeks prior to the 2020 election, “the bureau induced major social media titans” to “suppress derogatory reporting about the Bidens — specifically, the New York Post’s mid-October 2020 reporting on the laptop.” The FBI claimed The Post’s reporting was likely a Russian “influence operation.” But the real influence operation was being “carried out by current and former U.S. intelligence officials” co-opted by Biden Democrats to discredit “the laptop and its damning contents.”
From the right: What a Trump Win Would Reveal
If Donald Trump — “an objectively bad candidate who doesn’t represent conservatism well” — wins in November, it should “raise questions for Democrats,” argues USA Today’s Nicole Russell: “How could they have lost to such a uniquely awful opponent?” First, “they’ll have backed inept candidates not once but twice this year. How embarrassing.” Worse, “In the past couple of decades, the Democratic Party has built its foundation around far-left ideas”; a Trump victory “will be yet another indication that much of the nation has rejected such progressive policies.” And “if Trump could enact a few decent conservative policies while in office,” then “it would be a massive improvement to the past four years. A few policy changes might steer America back in the right direction.”
Law prof: The Left’s Musk Derangement Syndrome
Elton John just became “the latest among celebrities and pundits to denounce Musk” for backing Donald Trump and opposing censorship, notes Jonathan Turley at The Hill. Elon “became persona non grata when he bought Twitter and announced that he was dismantling the company’s massive censorship apparatus.” “Musk-mania is so overwhelming” that some critics, like Keith Olbermann, are actually “calling for his arrest, deportation and debarment from federal contracts.” California even “rejected the military’s plan to let” Musk’s SpaceX “launch up to 50 rockets per year” there. Why such “intense hatred”? Because Musk stands as an “immovable object” for the left, which “will now kill jobs, cancel national security programs and gut the Constitution in its unrelenting campaign” to get him.
Election watch: Boys for Don, Girls for Kam?
Nothing “defines this election more than one thing: sex,” snarks Rachel Janfaza at The Free Press. Polls “prove men and women are split when it comes to choosing candidates,” with a New York Times poll showing Harris up by 14 points among women, and Trump by 13 among men. And “nowhere is this political divide clearer than among young voters.” Many women have “forged a sense of identity and solidarity from the #MeToo movement following Trump’s 2016 election,” while “many young men felt alienated by that same movement” — and risked “being canceled for sharing their true social and political preferences.” Now that “both Harris and Trump” are “courting their own genders, both run the “risk of alienating the other sex.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board