Like scads of other reich-wingers on the Internet, convicted killer and devout Trumpophant James Arthur "Death" Ray has sounded the alarm on Xitter about a deceptive video snippet of Kamala Harris's "swipe of a pen" speech
A completely context-free snippet of a 2019 speech
by Kamala Harris, past and
present presidential candidate (and hopefully the future
president!), currently has the reich wing in a tizzy. The
truncated video appears to show Vice President Harris nefariously
boasting about her power as a prosecutor to control and even
destroy people's lives with a swipe of her pen.
Sociopathic New-Wage guru and convicted killer James Arthur Ray, who has
flung himself head first and with mouth wide open into the toxic waste dump that is
Trumpism, shared the deceptive snippet on Xitter on August 30,
2024, accompanied by this comment:
Is this the person you want in charge of the most powerful country in the world? Anyone who thinks this way has evil within them...
Well, I must say that Ray is a fine one to talk about "evil." Obviously he's projecting again. In any case it should
come as no surprise that he is an ardent Trump supporter who is
perfectly willing to paint Madame Vice President as an evil, dangerous,
power-crazed demon, while totally overlooking Mango Mussolini's
lies, felonies, authoritarian obsessions, and total lack of moral
compass.
Ray, like his serial-scammer colleague Kevin Trudeau, is just another
sorry illustration of the marriage-made-in-hell between Scamworld and
reich-wing politix. Grifters are
attracted to reich-wing/republican philosophies and policies, and
I've been saying for years that this is due in large part to the
reich's traditional disdain for consumer protection laws and
regulations, the very tools that, apart from education, are
necessary to protect the rest of us from the crooks.
Even as he has no room to talk about evil,
Ray has zero standing in any discussion about the abuse of power.
For years he
abused his power over his followers,
resulting in numerous injuries and at least four deaths of said
followers.
The original Xitter post that Ray
shared was generated by "Paul Hookem," a pro-Trump and MAGA disinformation account that boasts of being un-banned by Elon after four years
in exile. Great work, Elon. You brought the class back to Xitter.
Apart from considering the (scummy, scammy) sources of the tweet
and re-tweet, when I actually watched the video it was quite
clear to me that it had been, shall we say, strategically edited.
A quick fact-check search verified my suspicion. From Politifact, August 30, 2024:
...rather than bragging about her prosecutorial power, Harris was discussing the importance of leaders using power responsibly because of the potential for harm if power is misused. She said that it was something she realized early in her 20s when she started work as a prosecutor.
In her 2019 speech, Harris sought to describe then-President Donald Trump as using his power irresponsibly. The viral clip ends before a crucial part of her speech.
"And I was just a lowly deputy DA," she went on to say to laughter from the audience. "Yet we have a person in the White House who holds the office of president of the United States, who does not fully, or even partially, understand what it means to have power," she said of Trump. "When you truly understand what it means to be powerful, you understand that the greatest measure of your strength is not who you beat down, it is who you lift up."...
...After talking about her pen swipe’s power, she added: "It is an incredible amount of power, and you want to make sure that the people who have this kind of power are taking seriously, the responsibility, in terms of understanding as much as anything the impact on the people who will be affected by that."
The full footage of Harris' 45-minute keynote speech, delivered to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Democrats annual banquet in 2019, was captured on C-SPAN.
* * * * *
As I've noted on previous blog posts, James Ray's Xitter activity normally generates very little, if any, engagement. Despite his ongoing boasts about all of his accomplishments, he's essentially as much of a nobody on Xitter as I am. But a Xitter user named George Wade did choose to engage on this particular post, responding in the affirmative to Ray's question re Kamala, "Is this the person you want in charge of the most powerful country in the world?"
Yes. I hear responsible compassion from this statement. She learned not to be rash and instinctive in judgment. She learned there is complexity in management. She learned to be a moral person, unlike someone else we know.
To which Ray responded:
Marxists are not moral. Not sure what you're seeing claiming to be Christian. But their policies are the farthest thing from Christ's teachings.
The references to Christianity and Christ are
apparently based on George Wade's Xitter profile, which leads
with the phrase, "Lifelong faith in the Lord God." Ray
is hardly the person to be preaching about Christ's teachings,
and certainly not one to judge somebody else's professed faith --
but then again, sanctimonious babbling about Jeezus is the
foundation of the Christofascist/MAGA playbook, and Ray seems to
be solidly in that camp these days.
Mr. Wade responded with the suggestion that Harris' so-called
Marxism was only Ray's opinion, based on a
"misconstrued" definition of Marxism, and he added,
"I suppose you're in love with fascist Nazism?"
To which Ray replied:
I'm in love with liberty, freedom, and justice. A constitutional Republic funded (sic) in God's Laws. You've been duped through grifters and manipulation.
Some two-bit troll using the handle @CosmicConnie wrote:
James, you don't have a whole lot of room, morally speaking, to be talking about grifters or manipulation.
George Wade's response to Ray was more to the point.
I want freedom, Liberty & justice. As do citizens of every race, creed & ethnicity.We do not want Donald Trump’s authoritarian, fascist heavy hand removing our freedom.
The definition of a constitutional republic, btw, is a representative democracy with a freely elected president.
A little later Ray wrote:
Listen to what [Kamala] tells you my friend. Have you done this? Her father was a communist (look it up) and all of her policies are communistic/socialistic.
Well, technically, Donald Harris, a Stanford
University professor and author of the 1978 book Capital
Accumulation and Income Distribution, was a post-Keynesian economist with a Marxist
perspective. Oh, goodness gracious,
where's old Joe McCarthy when you need him?
It's amusing that so many morons throw the words
"communism," "socialism," and
"Marxism" around so carelessly and interchangeably,
seemingly without any awareness of the differences.
Ray, never a beacon of originality, is copycatting again by
participating in the new Red Scare that is spreading around the
reich-wing idiosphere like crabs on 1960s hippies. (Yes, I know
I've used that simile on previous blog posts, but I believe in
recycling.) It's become quite the reich-wing fashion to hurl
accusations of communism at anyone who doesn't have his or her
nose up Trump's ass.
So it's no surprise whatsoever that Kamala Harris would be a
popular target of these accusations. There's another reich-wing
thing going around that purports to show her commie party membership card. The card is totally fake, of course.
And it's not just Kamala Harris who's getting the Red-Scare
treatment, nor is it a brand-new phenomenon. From PBS, June 19, 2023:
Experts who study political messaging say associating Democrats with Marxism only furthers the country’s polarization — and is simply wrong: Biden has promoted capitalism and Democratic lawmakers are not pushing to reshape American democracy into a communist system.
That hasn’t mattered to Trump and other Republicans, who for years have used hyperbolic references to the associated political ideologies to spark fears about Democrats and the dangers they supposedly pose.
Moreover, those who esteem Trump and his MAGA allies as the guardians of capitalism and the free market seriously need to reconsider that stance. In a May 29, 2024 opinion piece on TIME.com titled "The Coming MAGA Assault on Capitalism," Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld wrote:
Sensationalist narratives trumpeting how business leaders are supposedly eager to welcome Donald Trump back to the White House and pining for the days of his business-friendly tax cuts are missing an important dimension: the escalating, overt hostility of populist MAGA voices to business.
This hostility starts from the top with Trump himself. While many business leaders regard certain aspects of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, such as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan’s zealous antitrust enforcement, as overreach; they surely do not miss Trump’s far more invasive and micro-managerial meddling in their business affairs. The former President was notorious for inserting himself into business and regulatory processes to carry out personal vendettas and help friends. Although the GOP has long been the home of big business, many observers overlook the frequency with which Trump targeted business leaders as a big, bad bogeyman to advance populist policies...
...Trump’s capriciousness obfuscated his complex brew of personal business interests with genuine U.S. commercial and national security priorities. U.S. tech companies were bewildered when he reversed course in sanctioning China’s ZTE despite massive documented proliferation violations helping Iran. Trump’s explanation, that it would cost 50,000 jobs in China, rang hollow.
This highly personalized divide and conquer, carrots and sticks approach characterized Trump’s dealings with business leaders time and time again, as he tried repeatedly to pit rivals firms against each other in WWE-style slapdowns and Trump fealty contests: General Motors vs. Ford, Lockheed Martin vs. Boeing, Pfizer vs. Merck, and so on...
Professor Sonnenfeld goes on to explain why it
is becoming increasingly clear that a second Trump term would
feature "far more policies which are substantively
anti-business than even his first term," citing such
republican luminaries as Trump's running-off-at-the-mouth-mate JD
Vance, as well as Matt Gaetz and Ted Cruz. They're all for small
government -- except when big government and serious government
overreach suit their own agendas. (Reference reproductive choice and LGBTQ rights, f'rinstance.)
But all of that stuff is far too subtle for most
MAGAts, including, it appears, James Arthur Ray. Ray has clearly
found a comfortable position on his knees to Trump, just sucking
and sucking and sucking, in every sense of the word... and that's
totally on brand for him. Evil attracts evil.
The good news is that there are powerful and growing forces
countering that evil. Ever since the Harris/Walz ticket became a
thing, I've felt more hopeful about the future of American
democracy than I'd felt in a long time. So I'm going to do my
part to fight evil by voting blue in November. If you're an eligible and registered US voter, I hope that you do
too.
Before you leave...
This has been, through what is no apparent fault of her own
(excluding, perhaps karmic matters that are quite beyond her
ability to comprehend), a nightmare of a year for the ruler of
this Whirled. Money, alas, cannot make the nightmare go away, but
it can make it easier to bear. Now more than ever, donations are
urgently needed and profoundly appreciated. Here are some ways to
do it:
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