Víctor Davis Hanson on Vice President Bystander’s speech Thursday at the DNC.

“One Insulting, Sappy Harris Speech

Who would have thought that Harris all this time, over the last three and a half years, was not really an incumbent, but instead simply a fresh new and relatively unknown face (“Forward!”)?

Did anyone know that the “newcomer” Harris always has been a pro-Israel hawk, a pro-defense budget hawk, a crime fighterhawk, and (along with Tim Walz) a China hawk? And even an Iran hawk, no less?

(Did Harris simply ask her staff to find the 10 most important issues in the polls, and then find Trump’s positions on them, and then simply appropriate his?)

But her most shameless moment was her transmogrification into a border hawk—this from the co-architect of a destroyed border that has let in 10-million illegal aliens who have wrecked the budgets of dozens of big cities and who are complicit in the importation of fentanyl that kills 100,000 Americans and have fueled a violent crime wave.

Apparently, we, the people, whom Harris thinks are clueless, stupid, and amnesiac, must never ask her,

“When have you ever before said or supported such things?

And why did you not say or do such things when you were the second most powerful person in the United States over the last four years?

And since you are currently still Vice President serving a debilitated and vanished President, why not do all of these things right now—given you have almost six months left on your term?"

And who, contra Harris’s allegations, would have ever thought that Trump was responsible for Putin invading Ukraine when his administration (2017-2020) was the only one in four over twenty years (2004-2024) in which Putin never invaded a foreign country?

So, rarely have we seen such a narcissistic and hypocritical rant as Harris’s acceptance speech.

She, like most of the convention’s speakers, introduced herself to us with the anticipated victim “story” and “journey” (as if no one else in America has had a uniquely challenging story and uniquely good parents). (And haven’t we been told almost every detail of the Harris story previously by her sister, by her husband, and by herself?)

She lectured us on the dangers of Trump who, she lied,  supposedly sent an “armed mob” to the Capitol (not a single one of the hundreds arrested in the Capitol was found to be carrying a firearm). In truth, Trump had no relationship with Project 2025 as she alleged.

Then she claimed that Trump tried to bail out/release these supposedly dangerous rioters—this from the rebel rouser who tweeted out appeals to bail out immediately violent rioters arrested in the looting and arson of Minneapolis, May 2020.

Talk about incitement!

All this comes from the firebrand who shouted on national television that the already violent rioters in Washington DC should not stop (“They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take note of that on both levels.”).

As for our future, she said nothing about her previous support for “snatching” patents, her mandatory buybacks of guns, her prior opposition to fracking, abolishing ICE, single-payer only government health care, price controls, fining corporations over gender equity, raising corporate tax rates, a wealth tax, a tax on unearned gains, and packing the court.

What happened to those once vibrant advocacies?

As for abortion, Donald Trump was pilloried in the primaries by conservatives for being too liberal on the issue.

He always said leave it up to the states in accordance with Roe vs. Wade; no ban on abortion in instances of rape and incest; but a ban on late-term, partial-birth abortions in which a baby’s life is ended as it enters the world. He has never supported a national abortion ban, nor copied Project 2025’s abortion views.

Finally, I think we might wish to adjust this nonstop euphemistic mantra of “reproductive rights”.

No one is suggesting that women do not have absolute freedom to “reproduce” and be “reproductive”.

Instead, abortion is about “de-productive rights”,  or the argument over ending a life and even a life that is often self-sustaining apart from the mother’s womb.

In a nation with a 1.6 and falling fertility rate, over a million abortions performed in 2023, an ethos of childlessness, and laws that let the people of each state vote on abortion, it seems Democratic “weird” to keep fixating on and calling endemic, unbridled de-production as dangerous restrictions on reproduction.”

https://x.com/vdhanson/status/1826967691128913963?s=46&t=XT3FnbOK8c1Ra04lGp2CrQ