Oprah Winfrey spoke at the Democratic National Convention this week. Oprah is an American icon -- a phenomenally successful media personality, actress, producer, bestselling author and entrepreneur. Her net worth is estimated at $3 billion, making her the wealthiest female celebrity in the United States.
In her speech at the convention Wednesday night, Oprah claimed that the Harris/Walz ticket would protect freedom and democracy, and support "people who work hard for the money." She told the audience that this election is about "what we want our futures to look like" and insisted that "Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can give us decency and respect." Oprah emphasized that Harris was a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. She had plenty of ugly accusations about her former best buddy Donald Trump, and encouraged the audience to vote instead for "optimism," "inclusion," "truth," "honor" and "joy" -- the latest Harris campaign buzzword
Lofty sentiments. Unfortunately, much of what Oprah said simply isn't true.
As governor of Minnesota, Walz took his time calling in the National Guard while sections of Minneapolis burned during the spring 2020 George Floyd riots, but had police patrols shooting Minneapolis residents with paintballs if they ventured out onto their porches past curfew. His wife commented that she left the windows open so she could enjoy the smell of burning tires. Walz's absurd and draconian policies during the COVID-19 pandemic -- including a "snitch" line so Minnesotans could report their neighbors violating lockdown rules -- prompted Reason magazine to call Walz a "tyrant."
For her part, Harris promoted a fund to bail out criminals arrested for violence during the 2020 riots and argued in favor of "defunding" police forces. As a prosecutor, she incarcerated more than 1,000 Black men for minor drug possession charges despite her own recreational use of marijuana.
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Her role in the Biden administration's open borders policy has been catastrophic; upwards of 10 million illegal immigrants have crossed into this country under her tenure as "border czar," with increased illegal drug importation, record numbers of fentanyl poisoning deaths, more than 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children lost, and staggering amounts of American taxpayer dollars ($150 billion a year) diverted from our citizens' needs to people who have no legal right to be here.
Does this sound like "freedom"? Does it show "respect" for the business owners who lost their property and their livelihoods during the 2020 riots? Is it "decent" to allow countless children to fall into sex trafficking, or subject Americans to crime and mayhem? Is this really what Americans want the future to look like?
Even if you find Oprah's words uplifting, the conclusions she draws therefrom are wrong.
Oprah acknowledged that "these are complicated times" that "require adult conversation." But an adult conversation about a presidential election means discussions about actual policies. And in Oprah's remarks, there was nothing about policy at all.
You don't vote for Harris because she's female or because her parents were immigrants. That's inspiring, sure, but it doesn't qualify her to be president.
Voters must understand and evaluate a candidate's policies, because we are governed as a nation by policy. Our businesses are regulated by policies; our communities are affected by policies; our schools and the children in them are impacted by policies -- not by someone's skin color or their ethnicity or their sex or their family's country of origin.
Oprah isn't alone; most of the DNC speakers have devoted their airtime to demonizing Trump but avoided discussing Harris/Walz policies (other than unlimited abortion, which seems to be the only one they care about -- or at least the only one they know their audience will agree with).
And it's not just at the convention where any discussion of policy is absent. Harris has been the de facto nominee for 33 days. She has held no press conferences nor given any interviews in that time, and her website contains no information about policy at all
None.
The truth is that the proposed policies of the Harris/Walz ticket (like so many Democrat policies) would be unpopular because they're terrible; terrible for businesses and the economy, terrible for families and children, terrible for schools, terrible for the military, national security and foreign policy, terrible for taxpayers.
Beyond her past record, Harris has tossed out a few hints about her ideas. She recently suggested price controls for food, a proposal even her supporters admitted would create shortages, black markets, corporate collusion and business collapse. Then there's her support for raising the corporate income tax to 28%. That would be passed along to consumers (as all corporate taxes are) in the form of higher prices for goods and services -- at a time when inflation has already sent prices skyrocketing. She wants much higher taxes on inherited property, a policy that has devastated family farms and businesses. She's calling for taxes on "unrealized gains" -- meaning that if what you own increases in value, you'd be expected to pay taxes on it, even if you haven't sold it. That would be an unmitigated disaster for small and medium businesses, most of which don't have huge amounts of cash on hand. If you can't pay the taxes, you'd have to sell the business. Who would be able buy all these struggling businesses? Multinational corporations and the wealthiest individuals. And this isn't to mention the lobbying that big corporations can pay for to carve out exemptions for themselves, which most businesses cannot afford.
Harris, Walz and their entire campaign apparatus are banking on spending the next 73 days playing three-card monte with the American public, using identity politics, "mean tweets" and mawkish sentimentality. Because they know full well that if voters truly understood the policies the Harris/Walz ticket intends to impose on the country, this election would already be over.
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