Episode Details

Ron Unz, editor and publisher of the Unz Review, discusses “Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and the Tottering American Empire.” a useful summary of ongoing ever-more-bizarre developments in American politics.  We’ll compare notes on the “Trump shooting” in Butler, Pennsylvania, an issue we sharply disagree on. The likelihood of a major escalation on the West Asian front, in the wake of Israel’s assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh and Fouad Shukur, will also be on the agenda.

Excerpts:

So yeah, things are not getting any less weird by the week, are they?

It's just a very strange time in American politics right now.

It certainly is. And the month of July may actually go down in history books as one of the stranger months in presidential politics, won't it?

Look, we had—there was a very suspicious assassination attempt against Donald Trump, who was leading in the polls. One of the main presidential candidates and a former president. And he came very close to dying in that assassination attempt, according to all the news media reports. And just a few days afterwards, his opponent, incumbent President Joseph Biden, was suddenly forced to leave the race, being replaced by his vice president.

There's never been a case before of somebody winning 99% of the primary delegates and then being forced out of the race by the donors and political operatives in his own party.

One of the aspects of your article that some might push back against would be: They would say, well, that's true, Ron. It seems very undemocratic that Biden would get virtually all the primary votes and then the donors and oligarchs would just force him out. However, the polls show that everybody approves of that, that all the Democrats almost unanimously approve of the oligarchs doing this to them. So what does that tell you about the voters?

Well, I mean, it basically shows, you know, that certainly would be the case. For example, if another candidate had simply been picked by fiat and if the media, the Democratic leading media, had all endorsed that choice, I think it's very possible that most of the democratic-leaning public would have supported it.

The truth is, Kamala Harris was an extremely unsuccessful presidential candidate when she ran. One of the points I made in my article was that when she ran for the nomination— she'd been elected U.S. Senator from the state of California—she checked off every diversitarian box. She's half South Asian, half Caribbean black. Her husband is Jewish. And so she ended up being regarded as one of the leading presidential candidates on the Democratic side in the primaries. She raised $43 million. She was one of the strongest fundraisers except for Bernie Sanders. And yet she did so badly with the actual voters in the Democratic primaries that she ended up dropping out of the race before the first vote was cast in Iowa, and got zero delegates.

So in other words, she clearly ran the most unsuccessful presidential campaign in American history. But again, the donors and the operatives then persuaded Biden to put her on the ticket. And that's why she's vice president and might end up being president in another few months.

It is all very strange. But again, for me, the strangest part is the acquiescence of the public, especially the Democrats that don't seem to have that much of a problem with it. Of course, there are so many things that they should have problems with that they don't. But how do you explain that? Kamala Harris has never been very popular. As you pointed out, her campaign was a complete fiasco. Nobody particularly liked her as vice president, including the