The vice presidential debate settled one important question: Yes, whatever happens in November, J.D. Vance, age 40, is the future of American conservatism. He was confident, he was smart, he was in command. A European conservative friend watching the debate with me said, “If the Republican Party had twenty J.D. Vances, they would be running the country.”
But you know what the debate didn’t settle?
Where the Democratic and Republican campaigns stand on the Ukraine war.
Where they stand on the economic and military challenges from China.
Where they stand on the issue of women’s rights (and family rights) versus transgender rights.
Where they stand on the issue of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies.
Where they stand on the deep racial conflict in America.
The debate neither settled nor illuminated these issues, because the CBS moderators—Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan—didn’t ask about them. They did, however, ask about climate change and January 6, two issues of burning importance to coastal liberals.
Whether it intended to or not, Team CBS protected Tim Walz’s vulnerable flanks. On all of those unasked questions, the Democrats are vulnerable. The party stands for a failed status quo. Watching the debate from Europe, it was striking how insular and out of touch the journalist-led discussion was—and not only because the questions favored the Democrats.
Having just spent ten days in the U.S., it seems to me like Americans, in general, are not as aware as they should be about how fragile the country is on the world stage.
Take Ukraine. The U.S. has backed the Zelensky government to the hilt, and the Ukrainians have fought bravely against the Russian invaders. But there is now no realistic chance that Ukraine can prevail. What can happen—what can far too easily happen—is this stalemated war could expand into a regional conflict, or worse.
Washington is considering granting Kyiv permission to use long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory. The Kremlin has recently updated its nuclear doctrine to state, in effect, that it would hold the United States and its NATO allies responsible for damage from Ukrainian missiles.
Washington is risking nuclear war to advance its geostrategic goals through Ukraine. Shouldn’t vice presidential candidates be asked for their views on this matter? True, Americans usually don’t vote on foreign policy questions, but there can be no more important issue in the world today than the risk of nuclear conflict.
Consider China, America’s greatest rival on the world stage. In the past few days, Xi Jinping has stated once again his determination to conquer Taiwan and reunite it by force to the mainland. What will the U.S. do if China attacks? Repeated war games show that American forces would lose against the Chinese. Where do Vance and Walz stand on defense? On the military recruitment crisis, which has been exacerbated by woke Pentagon policies? On the role the United States should play in a multipolar world?
Don’t expect CBS to ask them. The U.S. could be in a shooting war with nuclear-armed China within the next few years, but CBS’s crack journalists care more about climate change, which has only been asked about a thousand times.
The Harris-Walz team has claimed the most extreme position possible on transgender rights. Meanwhile, female athletes are losing competitions to biological males masquerading as females. Violent male offenders, including sexual offenders, who now identify as female are being sent into women’s prisons. Female spaces, like bathrooms and locker rooms, are now open to biological males who call themselves females. There were two women asking questions of Walz and Vance on Tuesday night. Why doesn’t this issue matter to them?
Plus, some liberal states—like Tim Walz’s Minnesota—have declared themselves to be “sanctuary states” for minors seeking to change their sex. If an underage transgender patient comes to Minnesota seeking treatment, the state will not comply with courts in their home states demanding their return.
“Fact checkers” say that Trump and Vance are wrong to claim that the Minnesota law allows the state to seize children from out of state families who come to Minnesota seeking sex-related chemical or surgical mutilation of their bodies. Here are the opening lines of the bill Tim Walz signed into law:
A law of another state that authorizes a state agency to remove a child from the child’s parent or guardian because the parent or guardian allowed the child to receive gender-affirming health care, as defined in section 548.415, paragraph (b), is against the public policy of this state and must not be enforced or applied in a case pending in a court in this state. A court order for the removal of a child issued in another state because the child’s parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in this state must not be enforced in this state.
So: if a divorced custodial parent seeking to trans a child over the other parent’s objection takes the kid to Minnesota and claims sanctuary status, nothing the courts in the child’s home state say can stop the process. Would the state have seized the child in that case? It’s a distinction without a difference.
Reporting on LGBT issues, especially on transgender kids, is so biased in the United States that most Americans arguably don’t really understand how radical the laws are in some states, nor do they grasp how far to the left Democrats are, behind their vapid “Love is love” rhetoric. In 2019, Kamala Harris publicly came out in favor of taxpayer-funded sex change operations for illegal aliens in American prisons. Trans rights are an issue that cuts right to the heart of American family life.
CBS doesn’t think the transgender issue merits mention in a vice presidential debate—no doubt because it would be very, very hard for Tim Walz to defend his position to ordinary Americans.
The Democratic Party is also maximalist on questions of race. Kamala Harris has repeatedly endorsed the concept of “equity”—meaning, she believes in equal outcomes, not equal opportunities. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has adopted an internal policy protocol that makes DEI its Number One priority. For a short time, Tim Walz’s administration made race a factor in the ability to obtain anti-COVID treatment—meaning that a rich black person could in theory bypass a poor white person in getting medical care for COVID. The state backtracked on this policy under criticism, but it reveals the racialist mindset of Democrats—an ideological orientation that is a matter of rising controversy, especially with recent court rulings calling university admissions based on race unconstitutional.
It’s a big deal, and will become a bigger deal as the white population of the U.S. declines relative to the Latino and Asian populations. You’d think journalists would want to know where the two men on stage would lead America through this emotionally-charged thicket, especially given that one of them (Vance) is in an interracial marriage. Nope. Not CBS. Either O’Donnell and Brennan are out of touch, or they know that Tim Walz, as governor of a state wracked by 2020 race riots, would be especially vulnerable to such queries.
By any measure, J.D. Vance won the debate with Tim Walz, though Walz didn’t flop. Yet the real loser of this debate was CBS News, which failed to highlight critically important issues relevant to America’s future. We can only speculate on what was in the heads of the journalists who came up with that list of questions, but to this foreign-based American observer, the vice presidential debate was another sign of the failure of elite media to do their jobs.
It might not be all that important to Europeans how Americans settle their problems with race and LGBT rights, though given how influential U.S. popular culture is in Europe, it matters more than you might think. But it matters very much to Europeans how Washington views the Ukraine war, and America’s long-term strategic position in the world—especially towards China. The long era of Pax Americana is drawing to a swift close. There is little indication that the American leadership class—including in the national media—are grappling with the problems related to America’s declining power and status on the world stage.
In my own travels back to the U.S. from Europe since the 2022 start of the Ukraine war, I have been struck by how little ordinary Americans know about the war’s complexities. And why should they? The media have by and large told a story tailor-made to support Washington’s geostrategic ambitions. There’s a reason why the arch-neocon Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Harris represents a continuation of war policy; Trump stands for the prospect of a negotiated peace in Ukraine.
It’s anecdotal, admittedly, but I have yet to meet a fellow American in America who knows anything about the background of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and why it is not as black-and-white as the U.S. Government and the American media say. J.D. Vance understands the hard realities of that war. He ought to have been given a chance to talk about it Tuesday night, and Walz, in turn, should have been afforded the chance to respond. It’s important—especially given the dramatic differences between Republican and Democratic voters on U.S. policy towards European defense.
On second thought, it is probably more important to Europe, in the long run, how America solves its domestic divisions, than it seems. Europe depends on a strong America to defend it. This is unsustainable, but for now, that’s reality. Are the American people up for the task? The U.S. Armed Forces are facing a crisis in recruitment, and the worst crisis in public confidence of this century. Not only are recruiting numbers down, but domestic divisions are turning the military into a force made primarily of soldiers, sailors, and airmen from the South and the Midwest, which are more conservative.
Military planners and geostrategists on both sides of the Atlantic had better be thinking about the willingness of fighting-age men to go to war to defend their governments’ policies. In the U.S., one hears about increasing numbers of conservative families with multigenerational records of military service now advising their service-age children not to go into the armed forces. Why not? Because they don’t trust the government with the lives of their children, and because they don’t want their kids to have to deal with the ideologically charged, woke military the Pentagon has created. It’s not just the military: polling shows that Americans’ faith in their institutions are at historical lows.
A disunited America, an America turned in on itself, is not an America that Europe can count on. In this sense, domestic U.S. politics will have an effect on European security. What’s more, all signs out of Washington indicate that a Harris victory means that the next administration will turn up the punitive rhetoric and measures against Hungary and other European states that might elect nationalist populist governments of the Right.
Political parties of the nationalist right are gaining strength in Europe for the same reason that undergirds so much of Trump’s support in America: people are fed up with mass migration. Yet the Democratic Party’s plan on migration is more or less what the European establishment’s plan is: continue the status quo, and condemn as bigoted anyone who says otherwise.
The biggest lesson of the vice-presidential debate is that J.D. Vance is the most powerful rising force in American national politics today, one who, because he is a young and articulate advocate of countercultural conservatism, will be the dominant figure on the Right for years to come. Europeans had better get used to him now, because they’re going to be seeing and hearing a lot more from this man in the years—even decades—to come.
The second most important lesson is how disconnected elite journalists are from the most pressing and controversial issues of this election season—including on war, peace, and America’s declining standing in the emerging new world order. If Americans are not informed, or are under-informed, about the real world beyond their borders, whose fault is that?
No doubt CBS’s team thinks of itself as cosmopolitan, but they came off as liberal American provincials who secretly believe the most important issue of the 2024 election is preventing Donald Trump from re-taking the White House. They behaved as if the world beyond America’s shores wasn’t on fire, and if the American homeland wasn’t a smoldering tinderbox. They failed—and the failure of their institutions will have consequences.
The U.S. Vice Presidential Debate’s Loser? The American People
U.S. Senator and Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance (L) and Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz participate in the Vice Presidential debate hosted by CBS News on October 1, 2024.
Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP
The vice presidential debate settled one important question: Yes, whatever happens in November, J.D. Vance, age 40, is the future of American conservatism. He was confident, he was smart, he was in command. A European conservative friend watching the debate with me said, “If the Republican Party had twenty J.D. Vances, they would be running the country.”
But you know what the debate didn’t settle?
Where the Democratic and Republican campaigns stand on the Ukraine war.
Where they stand on the economic and military challenges from China.
Where they stand on the issue of women’s rights (and family rights) versus transgender rights.
Where they stand on the issue of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies.
Where they stand on the deep racial conflict in America.
The debate neither settled nor illuminated these issues, because the CBS moderators—Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan—didn’t ask about them. They did, however, ask about climate change and January 6, two issues of burning importance to coastal liberals.
Whether it intended to or not, Team CBS protected Tim Walz’s vulnerable flanks. On all of those unasked questions, the Democrats are vulnerable. The party stands for a failed status quo. Watching the debate from Europe, it was striking how insular and out of touch the journalist-led discussion was—and not only because the questions favored the Democrats.
Having just spent ten days in the U.S., it seems to me like Americans, in general, are not as aware as they should be about how fragile the country is on the world stage.
Take Ukraine. The U.S. has backed the Zelensky government to the hilt, and the Ukrainians have fought bravely against the Russian invaders. But there is now no realistic chance that Ukraine can prevail. What can happen—what can far too easily happen—is this stalemated war could expand into a regional conflict, or worse.
Washington is considering granting Kyiv permission to use long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory. The Kremlin has recently updated its nuclear doctrine to state, in effect, that it would hold the United States and its NATO allies responsible for damage from Ukrainian missiles.
Washington is risking nuclear war to advance its geostrategic goals through Ukraine. Shouldn’t vice presidential candidates be asked for their views on this matter? True, Americans usually don’t vote on foreign policy questions, but there can be no more important issue in the world today than the risk of nuclear conflict.
Consider China, America’s greatest rival on the world stage. In the past few days, Xi Jinping has stated once again his determination to conquer Taiwan and reunite it by force to the mainland. What will the U.S. do if China attacks? Repeated war games show that American forces would lose against the Chinese. Where do Vance and Walz stand on defense? On the military recruitment crisis, which has been exacerbated by woke Pentagon policies? On the role the United States should play in a multipolar world?
Don’t expect CBS to ask them. The U.S. could be in a shooting war with nuclear-armed China within the next few years, but CBS’s crack journalists care more about climate change, which has only been asked about a thousand times.
The Harris-Walz team has claimed the most extreme position possible on transgender rights. Meanwhile, female athletes are losing competitions to biological males masquerading as females. Violent male offenders, including sexual offenders, who now identify as female are being sent into women’s prisons. Female spaces, like bathrooms and locker rooms, are now open to biological males who call themselves females. There were two women asking questions of Walz and Vance on Tuesday night. Why doesn’t this issue matter to them?
Plus, some liberal states—like Tim Walz’s Minnesota—have declared themselves to be “sanctuary states” for minors seeking to change their sex. If an underage transgender patient comes to Minnesota seeking treatment, the state will not comply with courts in their home states demanding their return.
“Fact checkers” say that Trump and Vance are wrong to claim that the Minnesota law allows the state to seize children from out of state families who come to Minnesota seeking sex-related chemical or surgical mutilation of their bodies. Here are the opening lines of the bill Tim Walz signed into law:
So: if a divorced custodial parent seeking to trans a child over the other parent’s objection takes the kid to Minnesota and claims sanctuary status, nothing the courts in the child’s home state say can stop the process. Would the state have seized the child in that case? It’s a distinction without a difference.
Reporting on LGBT issues, especially on transgender kids, is so biased in the United States that most Americans arguably don’t really understand how radical the laws are in some states, nor do they grasp how far to the left Democrats are, behind their vapid “Love is love” rhetoric. In 2019, Kamala Harris publicly came out in favor of taxpayer-funded sex change operations for illegal aliens in American prisons. Trans rights are an issue that cuts right to the heart of American family life.
CBS doesn’t think the transgender issue merits mention in a vice presidential debate—no doubt because it would be very, very hard for Tim Walz to defend his position to ordinary Americans.
The Democratic Party is also maximalist on questions of race. Kamala Harris has repeatedly endorsed the concept of “equity”—meaning, she believes in equal outcomes, not equal opportunities. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has adopted an internal policy protocol that makes DEI its Number One priority. For a short time, Tim Walz’s administration made race a factor in the ability to obtain anti-COVID treatment—meaning that a rich black person could in theory bypass a poor white person in getting medical care for COVID. The state backtracked on this policy under criticism, but it reveals the racialist mindset of Democrats—an ideological orientation that is a matter of rising controversy, especially with recent court rulings calling university admissions based on race unconstitutional.
It’s a big deal, and will become a bigger deal as the white population of the U.S. declines relative to the Latino and Asian populations. You’d think journalists would want to know where the two men on stage would lead America through this emotionally-charged thicket, especially given that one of them (Vance) is in an interracial marriage. Nope. Not CBS. Either O’Donnell and Brennan are out of touch, or they know that Tim Walz, as governor of a state wracked by 2020 race riots, would be especially vulnerable to such queries.
By any measure, J.D. Vance won the debate with Tim Walz, though Walz didn’t flop. Yet the real loser of this debate was CBS News, which failed to highlight critically important issues relevant to America’s future. We can only speculate on what was in the heads of the journalists who came up with that list of questions, but to this foreign-based American observer, the vice presidential debate was another sign of the failure of elite media to do their jobs.
It might not be all that important to Europeans how Americans settle their problems with race and LGBT rights, though given how influential U.S. popular culture is in Europe, it matters more than you might think. But it matters very much to Europeans how Washington views the Ukraine war, and America’s long-term strategic position in the world—especially towards China. The long era of Pax Americana is drawing to a swift close. There is little indication that the American leadership class—including in the national media—are grappling with the problems related to America’s declining power and status on the world stage.
In my own travels back to the U.S. from Europe since the 2022 start of the Ukraine war, I have been struck by how little ordinary Americans know about the war’s complexities. And why should they? The media have by and large told a story tailor-made to support Washington’s geostrategic ambitions. There’s a reason why the arch-neocon Dick Cheney has endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Harris represents a continuation of war policy; Trump stands for the prospect of a negotiated peace in Ukraine.
It’s anecdotal, admittedly, but I have yet to meet a fellow American in America who knows anything about the background of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and why it is not as black-and-white as the U.S. Government and the American media say. J.D. Vance understands the hard realities of that war. He ought to have been given a chance to talk about it Tuesday night, and Walz, in turn, should have been afforded the chance to respond. It’s important—especially given the dramatic differences between Republican and Democratic voters on U.S. policy towards European defense.
On second thought, it is probably more important to Europe, in the long run, how America solves its domestic divisions, than it seems. Europe depends on a strong America to defend it. This is unsustainable, but for now, that’s reality. Are the American people up for the task? The U.S. Armed Forces are facing a crisis in recruitment, and the worst crisis in public confidence of this century. Not only are recruiting numbers down, but domestic divisions are turning the military into a force made primarily of soldiers, sailors, and airmen from the South and the Midwest, which are more conservative.
Military planners and geostrategists on both sides of the Atlantic had better be thinking about the willingness of fighting-age men to go to war to defend their governments’ policies. In the U.S., one hears about increasing numbers of conservative families with multigenerational records of military service now advising their service-age children not to go into the armed forces. Why not? Because they don’t trust the government with the lives of their children, and because they don’t want their kids to have to deal with the ideologically charged, woke military the Pentagon has created. It’s not just the military: polling shows that Americans’ faith in their institutions are at historical lows.
A disunited America, an America turned in on itself, is not an America that Europe can count on. In this sense, domestic U.S. politics will have an effect on European security. What’s more, all signs out of Washington indicate that a Harris victory means that the next administration will turn up the punitive rhetoric and measures against Hungary and other European states that might elect nationalist populist governments of the Right.
Political parties of the nationalist right are gaining strength in Europe for the same reason that undergirds so much of Trump’s support in America: people are fed up with mass migration. Yet the Democratic Party’s plan on migration is more or less what the European establishment’s plan is: continue the status quo, and condemn as bigoted anyone who says otherwise.
The biggest lesson of the vice-presidential debate is that J.D. Vance is the most powerful rising force in American national politics today, one who, because he is a young and articulate advocate of countercultural conservatism, will be the dominant figure on the Right for years to come. Europeans had better get used to him now, because they’re going to be seeing and hearing a lot more from this man in the years—even decades—to come.
The second most important lesson is how disconnected elite journalists are from the most pressing and controversial issues of this election season—including on war, peace, and America’s declining standing in the emerging new world order. If Americans are not informed, or are under-informed, about the real world beyond their borders, whose fault is that?
No doubt CBS’s team thinks of itself as cosmopolitan, but they came off as liberal American provincials who secretly believe the most important issue of the 2024 election is preventing Donald Trump from re-taking the White House. They behaved as if the world beyond America’s shores wasn’t on fire, and if the American homeland wasn’t a smoldering tinderbox. They failed—and the failure of their institutions will have consequences.
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