If you're an incumbent member of Congress, pretty much the last thing you ever want to do is debate a primary opponent in public. As a sitting member, you already have every possible advantage. Unless you drop dead during a speech or get drunk and take your clothes off on a commercial airplane, you are very likely to be re-elected to Congress, so a televised debate cannot help you. It is all risk and no upside, but occasionally there is no avoiding it.
Democrats held a primary debate in New York City last night. They had no choice. Both the candidates in this race are incumbents. Thanks to a court decision that redrew congressional boundaries, the two most powerful members of the New York delegation are now running against each other for the same seat. That's a lot of fun. For 30 years, Carolyn Maloney has represented the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Over the same period, 30 years, Jerry Nadler has represented the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jerry Nadler is 75 years old. Carolyn Maloney is 76 years old. Rather than do the obvious thing and retire, the two are now competing for the newly drawn 12th Congressional District that will combine the Upper East Side and the Upper West Sides of Manhattan.
It turns out to be the richest district in American politics. Four of the Democratic Party's five top fundraising zip codes are within this district's boundaries. So, there's a lot at stake and we forced ourselves to watch the debate. We were richly rewarded for doing that. We're going to start tonight with a headline from the debate, which you've already likely seen. Neither one of these people is cheerleading for Joe Biden. Here's Carolyn Maloney.
MODERATOR: Should President Biden run again in 2024?
SURAJ PATEL, CANDIDATE: Yes.
MODERATOR: Mr. Nadler?
REP. JERRY NADLER: Too early to say. It doesn't serve the purpose of the Democratic Party to deal with that until after the midterms.
MODERATOR: Ms. Maloney?
REP CAROLYN MALONEY: I don't believe he's running for re-election.
"I don't believe he's running for reelection." That's what Carolyn Maloney said. Well, like everything she says, it's not exactly a profound observation. Of course, Joe Biden isn't running for re-election. He can barely find the men's room. The second the midterms are done, he will find a way to tell the rest of us that. So, that was not very interesting. It was predictable. What was very interesting and what tells you a lot about the Democratic Party is how these two candidates talked about their personal accomplishments and their goals for the country.
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Now, we should tell you, having watched it, that figuring out exactly what Maloney and Nadler were trying to say was not easy. These are not spry, articulate people. They're not magicians with the English language. Jerry Nadler, so enervated he had to sit for the entire debate because he is too weak to stand, but at one point, Nadler gathered the strength to boast about his greatest accomplishment in the Congress — that would be impeaching George W. Bush twice.
NADLER: And an insurrectionist Republican Party for the first time in our history, trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Now, therefore, I have, I — I am leading the fight to, uh, stop this and I have passed the, uh, two impeachments in leading this, I impeached Bush twice.
Twice. The secret to Jerry Nadler has never been his appearance, often remarked upon. It's been his intellect, which is small. Obviously, Nadler meant to say Donald Trump, not that he can remember what decade it is, but what he meant to say is not really a consolation for Democrats watching at home. The problem here is that Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, these are two of the most powerful Democrats in the United States Congress, running in the most influential district in the United States of America — neither of these candidates have anything to say.
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So, Jerry Nadler is asked, "What are you proud of?" And he's talking about multiple impeachments. Whatever you think of impeachments, did they improve a single life in this country? No. So, she was asked the same question, Carol Maloney. What are you proud of? What are your priorities? And so, she responded. Here are Carolyn Maloney's priorities for the United States.
MALONEY: Our work is not over yet. We need to protect women. We need to pass gun safety laws. We need to combat climate change.
So, those are her top priorities. This is one of the most powerful sitting members of Congress. First priority: protecting women. In other words: more abortions, protecting women from having children so they can continue to work in some depressing midtown bank. Don't raise your family. Go to work. What Carolyn Maloney does not mean by protecting women, of course, is punishing criminals. They're free to beat women on the subway in New York with no consequences, and they routinely do, but that's number one, protecting women, more abortions.
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Okay. Number two, gun safety laws. Now, none of these gun safety laws, meaning gun confiscation laws, will be enforced in places where the Democrats get a huge percentage of the vote, like Chicago or Baltimore or New York or Gary, Indiana. They get a pass, but disarm the other side and then number three, combating climate change because you don't need air conditioning in the summertime. You don't need a car. Look at Sri Lanka. They've done a great job. What's interesting is what Carolyn Maloney didn't mention as a top priority, and that would be the economy, inflation, and it's interesting because every poll taken shows that inflation is the number one issue that actual Americans care about.
So, why wouldn't Carolyn Maloney, who's a politician after all, can probably read a poll, why would she not include inflation? Well, it's possible she's not aware it's happening and we know this from the president of the San Francisco Fed. That would be Mary Daly. She explained her views on inflation inadvertently. Apparently, she was unaware she was being recorded and because she didn't know anyone was listening, Daly explained that inflation doesn't matter to her because she's rich, and we're quoting, "I don't find myself in a space," that's how they talk in San Francisco, in a space, "where I have to make tradeoffs because I have enough and many Americans have enough."
Oh, you've got enough. You've got enough. Stop your whining. Time to fix the climate. We're in charge of the weather now. So, these are the issues that the leaders of the Democratic Party and the party's donors, many of them in San Francisco and New York, care about. They don't care about inflation because they're rich and it doesn't affect them. In other words, they don't care about you at all and by the way, this isn't just true of long-standing establishment figures in the Democratic Party, like Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney. It's everywhere. It's endemic. It's in the fabric of the party itself.
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Even people who want to join the club repeat the same lines. At the debate last night, Maloney and Nadler, at 76 and 75, were joined by a 38-year-old lawyer called Suraj Patel. Now, Patel runs a multimillion-dollar hotel management company. He was the guy on stage who is supposed to be a breath of fresh air, the face of a new generation. So, what did he talk about? Issues that people care about? No. He referred back 15 years to describe his so-called ideas because it turns out he's an Obama Democrat.
PATEL: My name is Suraj Patel and I am a lawyer, a professor and an Obama Democrat from whom I learned the Democrats lead best when we lead with new ideas, energy and a new generation of leadership.
Yeah. That guy's got new ideas and energy, just like Barack Obama. That's why he's supporting Joe Biden running for re-election again. It's pathetic. It's not just him. It's not just Maloney, such as poor Jerry Nadler. It's the entire Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has run out of gas.
The Democratic Party at this point is a cartel that exists only to perpetuate itself and the elderly mediocrities who run and benefit from it — all of them. Kamala Harris is only 57 years old. She's a child by the standards of her party, but she still talks like a dementia patient, slowly and incomprehensibly. Here's Kamala struggling to explain what mail-in ballots are. Now you'd think she would understand mail-in ballots given that mail-in ballots are why she has a job, but she doesn't.
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KAMALA HARRIS: They said when they voted. I think sometimes the voting is you're just putting in your order. This is what you want. So, when people stood in those lines for hours, when they sat at their kitchen table for hours figuring out how they were going to fill out their ballot to vote by mail, when they drove by those drop boxes with their kids in the back seat patiently waiting to drop off that ballot, they were putting it in order.
We don't mean to beat up on Kamala Harris, who's obviously our favorite for the Democratic nomination next cycle, but she is the perfect distillation of everybody in power in the Democratic Party. Every word that emerges from Kamala Harris's mouth is a recycled talking point that's been run through a banality machine to remove the slightest hint of anything interesting or challenging or relevant or meaningful. So, no wonder Democrats are unpopular. They have nothing to offer.
They haven't updated their files. They believe it's 2005. You see this in foreign policy, particularly. They are living in their heads in a world in which the U.S. wields the world's most powerful military, backed by the world's strongest economy, and can do whatever it wants just by telling other people to obey. So, like Joe Biden, you just tell Russia, "Don't invade Ukraine," and of course it won't. We're America.
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You just let China know that we back Taiwan and the entire 75-year-old dispute over that island will be settled forever. They really believe that. They have no idea of this country's relative place in the world order because they don't know anything about reality as it stands right now. So, here's Nancy Pelosi, who imagines that she's so powerful that she can somehow bring about an indefinite peace in the Taiwan Strait just by saying so.
HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Today, our delegation, of which I'm very proud, came to Taiwan to make unequivocally clear we will not abandon our commitment to Taiwan and we're proud of our enduring friendship.
It doesn't mean anything. It's the barking of dogs. It's less relevant than dogs barking and trust us, the Chinese know that, but from Nancy Pelosi's perspective, "I said it. Therefore, it's going to happen. Problem solved." That's the world they believe we still live in. They imagine the United States is still so rich and powerful that we can afford any sort of pointless frivolity. We can tamper with the formula and suffer no ill effects.
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We can hire trans admirals and intersectional CIA officers and everything is going to be fine. That's how powerful we are. We can force Delta Airlines and United to apply affirmative action standards to airline pilots and somehow our planes will never crash because nothing bad ever happens in the world. These people have completely lost touch with reality. How out-of-touch are they? Well, the Democratic Party's main radical right now is Sandy Cortez of Westchester.
How radical is Sandy Cortez? Well, she spends her days defending the intel agencies and neocon foreign policy and the big banks. So, if your revolutionaries are reading scripts written by the World Economic Forum, maybe they're not actually very revolutionary. Maybe they're defending the status quo, and that's exactly what they're doing and they're doing it because they have no other plan.
The sad truth is the people who run the Democratic Party have just given up. They've given up on the country and given up on the people who live here. They've got no solutions for you. They're not even pretending that they do. "Climate! Trans!" They don't imagine a future. That's why they're telling you, "Smoke more weed, take more pills. Might as well cut off your junk and pretend to be a girl. Sterilize your kids. Abort your babies. There's no future worth having."
That's not a caricature. They're saying that out loud. They're done. Now, the Republican Party, by contrast, is suddenly showing signs of life, of thinking and responding to reality. They're faint signs. Trust me, the people who run it have no interest in changing the Republican Party. They've gotten rich from it. They're pretty happy with their sinecures. Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell are enraged by the changes. They're content with 2003. They'd like to invade Iraq again. Actually, Mitch McConnell got pretty rich from China, doesn't want that to change, but they're not actually in control of the party.
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The Republican Party is changing and we know that for certain because last night's election results in a couple of primaries show not just new faces, but new ideas. Blake Masters won the Republican primary for Senate in the state of Arizona. Candidates like Peter Meijer, for example, in Michigan, the guy who voted to allow men to play in women's sports because he's sensitive, lost.
In the Republican primary for Arizona's gubernatorial race, Kari Lake has just taken the lead. She's not like your parents' Republican Party. And in the state of Michigan, Tudor Dixon is now the Republican nominee. She will take on Gretchen Whitmer in the fall.