Vance in Defense of the Lie

Drawing by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 7/17/24.

Anne Applebaum, of all people, created or appropriated a meme, and a good one:

This was the moment that mattered. Trump's political movement relies on total impunity for liars, and mostly gets it. The lies bind them together, cement their feeling of power. pic.twitter.com/McbdBNwUyq

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) October 2, 2024

This is another instance of the same shocking openness as when Vance claimed that he was justified in telling lies (on the imaginary pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio) in order to get attention—

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana...

—and in this case turning it around on the moderator, making her the offender, and taking advantage of the moment to tell a more difficult-to-expose lie without fear of correction, as you see from the transcript:

Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

The CBP1 app, introduced in October 2020, was originally meant for truckers crossing from Mexico into US to schedule cargo inspections, so they could just show up at the border at their appointment time instead of lining up and waiting for hours and days clogging the road. In January 2023, DHS added some new functionality, so that it could also be used by individuals applying for asylum (from all over the place, but chiefly at that time the "Northern Triangle" of Central America) or Temporary Protected Status (at the moment for Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) to schedule interviews from the Mexican side of the border instead of having to wait in line for hours and days and months or, in the pattern that had become a serious problem since 2014 or so, crossing the border at an uncontrolled spot and chasing down a border patrol agent to interview them; and that May, the app was made the only way to get a first asylum interview at the Mexican border.

So the app, far from being a "Kamala Harris open border wand", is a piece of cell phone tech for applying the law as it has stood since the 1990 Immigration Act was signed by George H.W. Bush (in which Temporary Protected Status was instituted—the asylum provisions date back well before that), and meant to get rid of the much decried chaos at the border, or rather keep it on the Mexican side. In fact it adds a good deal of harshness to the system (for which it has been rightly called out by organizations like ACLU), as waiting in Mexico is difficult and dangerous, and it can take a really long time. But in terms of what it was intended to do, it's worked exceedingly well, with migration at the border at its lowest level since fall 2020 (when the Covid pandemic had largely shut it down).

And Vance's picture of a Kamala conspiracy to wave people in (presumably to vote illegally and beget "anchor babies" that will dilute America's blood) is as grotesquely false as the cat-eating canard. 

Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have 1 minute.

JDV: Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris' open border. And I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop. Look, I think what Tim said just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country. And now, now that she's running for President, or a few months before, she says that somehow she got religion and cared a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that she did when she became the Vice President, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.

Harris wasn't the "appointed border czar"; she was asked in early 2021 to work on combating the "root causes" of the wave of asylum seekers coming through Mexico from the three countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) by improving cooperation with the four countries on US immigration law and by encouraging investment to relieve the economic stresses of living in Central America, and it may have had some effect—by 2023 just 16% of all CPB encounters were with people from Golden Triangle countries, compared to 52% in 2021 (replaced by Venezuelans and Haitians, who were not part of Harris's mandate).

It's true that some family separations took place up through 2022, of parents accused of gang affiliations, or through the stupid Trump-instituted Title 42 program, but nothing like the systematic destruction of families pushed through by Stephen Miller in his truly czar-like, sadistic and violent, reign.

Fentanyl is not smuggled into the US by undocumented aliens, but by US citizens driving cars at the official crossings. Do the cartels use children as mules? Sure, if they're Americans and can drive:

Osvaldo Mendivil-Tamayo, a 25-year-old man from Tijuana who pleaded guilty to drug charges in 2020, operated as a sort of freelancer for cartels, overseeing a cadre of recruiters, according to court records and his lawyer.

He used Snapchat to talk to recruiters about identifying American students who regularly crossed from Tijuana to San Diego. One recruit was only 15 years old. Through his lawyer, Mr. Mendivil-Tamayo, who was recently released from prison, declined to comment.

It's particularly maddening because border patrol agents dealing with asylum seekers in the vicious ways advocated by the Trump administration were so busy with that that they didn't have time to inspect as many cars for fentanyl as they needed to. It seems likely that efforts in the Biden administration have done something to combat that, and may even have contributed to the decrease in US drug overdose deaths between 2022 and 2023 that was announced last May.

The "piece of legislation" was the one Biden introduced on the afternoon of Inauguration Day, same day he revoked the 94 Trump executive orders (I'm not checking if the number is correct):

The list of orders includes reissuing protections established under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, halting further construction of a border barrier and rolling back interior immigration enforcement priorities put in place by the previous administration.

The actions come the same day Biden will reportedly send to Congress a comprehensive immigration bill that, if passed, could provide a legal path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, including more than 1.7 million in Texas.

Harris didn't suddenly start caring about it in 2024. Unfortunately all the good stuff has been pruned out of the bill at the hands of Senator Lankford (R-OK) in the compromise bill that finally almost made it to the Senate before party leader Donald Trump ordered minority leader McConnell not to let them vote on it. Harris's promise to sign the bill is one I hope she doesn't keep; I want to see a much better one.

There were some other Vance lies on subjects I take an interest in that aren't, I think, getting the attention they deserve.

***

And Norah, you asked about climate change. I think this is a very important issue. Look, a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns. I think it's important for us, first of all, to say Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer, but one of the things that I've noticed some of our democratic friends talking a lot about is a concern about carbon emissions. This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let's just say that's true, just for the sake of argument, so we're not arguing about weird science. Let's just say that's true. Well, if you believe that, what would you, what would you want to do? The answer is that you'd want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible and you'd want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America because we're the cleanest economy in the entire world.

This is a wacky argument. The US is the second largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions, creating 12% of the world's total, or 13.83 tons of CO2 per person per year (China's total seems far worse at 34%, but it's quite a bit less than us at 9.24 tons per capita; India, the third worst, produces 7.6% of the total, and 2.07 tons per capita, and the EU, fourth, 6.44% and 5.66 tons, less than half as much as Americans do). We've made some progress, as China and India haven't, down to 94% of the emissions we produced in 1990, but the EU is down to 66%, and we ought to be able to do better.

So I'm not sure what Vance thinks he means by "cleanest economy in the entire world", but if it has anything to do with CO2 emissions then that's definitely weird science, and not true. Also Trump and Vance may say they support clean air and water (issues not directly related to climate change, important though they were back when Trump's brain was working at maximum, in the 1970s), but Trump's actions to roll back the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act (scrapping more than 100 rules in the latter) don't indicate support, and the Project 2025 text doesn't suggest the approach will be any better in a second Trump term:

Not surprisingly, the EPA under the Biden Administration has returned to the same top-down, coercive approach that defined the Obama Administration. There has been a reinstitution of unachievable standards designed to aid in the “transition” away from politically disfavored industries and technologies and toward the Biden Administration’s preferred alternatives. This approach is most obvious in the Biden Administration’s assault on the energy sector as the Administration uses its regulatory might to make coal, oil, and natural gas operations very expensive and increasingly inaccessible while forcing the economy to build out and rely on unreliable renewables. This approach has also been applied to pesticides and chemicals as the Biden Administration pushes the “greening” of agriculture and manufacturing among other industrial activities....

EPA’s structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed to reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government. This will require significant restructuring and streamlining of the agency... (Mandate for Leadership, chapter 13, pp. 418-20)

The preference for certain kinds of energy production over others isn't a matter of "political disfavoring" (it's not as if Harris had publicly asked a meeting of wind turbines to donate a billion dollars to her campaign). It is science. The primary cause of climate change is the burning of fossil fuel, and if you decided to "produce as much energy as possible in the United States" by burning coal, fuel oil, and natural gas, you'd be warming the planet that much faster. It's not what country you make the energy in that matters, it's what you make it out of. 

For that matter, the Biden-Harris plan as laid out in the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act is all about "reshoring as much American manufacturing as possible" in everything from microprocessors to trucks and batteries the size of a truck, like the sun-rechargeable ESS battery built in a shipping container illustrated below—

—only in such a way as to maximize the use of renewable energy. If you want to preserve us from climate change and reshore all the manufacturing you can in the US, that's the way to go.

***

JDV: Governor, you say trust the experts, but those same experts for 40 years said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we'd get cheaper goods. They lied about that. ...

So if you notice, what Governor Walz just did is he said, "First of all, Donald Trump has to listen to the experts." And then when he acknowledged that the experts screwed up, he said, well, "Donald Trump didn't do nearly as good of a job as the statistics show that he did." 

TW: No, that's a gross generalization. 

JDV: So what Tim Walz is doing. And I honestly, Tim, I think you got a tough job here because you've got to play whack-a-mole. You've got to pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver rising take home pay. Which, of course, he did. You've got to pretend that Donald Trump didn't deliver lower inflation, which, of course, he did.

The experts on importing Chinese products to the US checked up on their predictions afterwards, and found out they were true:

We estimate the impact of trade with China on U.S. consumer prices and use this evidence to discipline quantitative trade models. Using comprehensive price data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and two complementary identification strategies from Pierce and Schott (2016) and Autor et al. (2014), we find that trade with China had a large impact on U.S. prices. Between 2000 and 2007, a one percentage point increase in Chinese import penetration in a given industry led to a three percentage point fall in the Consumer Price Index in that industry. This effect is large but plausible; abstracting from GE effects and benchmarking our estimates against those of Autor et al. (2013), our results imply that increased Chinese import penetration generated benefits to U.S. consumers through lower prices equal to $101,250 per lost manufacturing job, or a cumulative 1.97% fall in the aggregate U.S.

I don't know what Vance thinks he's referring to on that, but it's clearly wrong.

On wages, it's true that worker wages did rise in the first three years of the Trump term, by a relatively measly 0.9% accounting for inflation, but thanks largely to a bunch of blue states and cities raising the minimum wage and a number of successful strikes by teachers and unionized workers. In the last year there was a real jump, but that was a statistical artifact of the Covid economic collapse, leading to an unemployment rate of 14.8%. The newly jobless workers were in low-income jobs, so not being counted in the statistics pushed up the average wage of everybody else.

Other actions by the Trump administration made wages lower than they otherwise might have been: refusal to accept a minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $15 an hour, which hit some 40 million workers, restricting eligibility for overtime pay affecting 8.2 million workers, canceling a 2% pay raise for millions of public servants (many of whom quit their jobs to be replaced by low-wage temp workers), and more.

There's no reason to say Trump "delivered" lower inflation, either. It was Covid that did that, with an assist from Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and their hopeless mismanagement that sunk the economy into recession and deflation that lasted until Trump left the White House, when recovery, and eventually inflation, began.

***

we know that thanks to Kamala Harris's open border, we've seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel. So that number, the amount of illegal guns in our country is higher today than it was three and a half years ago

No such thing. It's a well known fact that the guns flow in the other direction, cartel gunrunning networks paying Americans to buy weapons in the US and bring them across the border to Mexico, 200,000 to 500,000 a year. US authorities have upped the number of guns (typically AR and AK types of rifles) seized at the border under the Biden administration, from 173 in 2019 to 1,171 in 2023, but it's really just a drop in the bucket. If you think Mexico is murdering Americans with fentanyl overdoses, the US is murdering Mexicans in comparable numbers.

***

Look, what President Trump has said is that there were problems in 2020. And my own belief is that we should fight [my italics] about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square. And that's all I've said. And that's all that Donald Trump has said. Remember, he said that on January 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the President. Donald Trump left the White House. And now, of course, unfortunately, we have all of the negative policies that have come from the Harris-Biden administration. I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country, but unfortunately, it's not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship. It's Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics. It's big technology companies silencing their fellow citizens. And it's Kamala Harris saying that rather than debate and persuade her fellow Americans, she'd like to censor people who engage in misinformation....Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale. She did it during COVID, she's done it over a number of other issues. And that, to me, is a much bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said that protesters should peacefully protest on January 6th.

I think it should be noted that it was Stephen Miller who wrote that the January 6 crowd should protest "peacefully and patriotically" in his text for Trump's speech on the Ellipse (you can recognize Miller by te telltale alliteration). It was Trump's improvised interpolations that added the word "fight" 20-some times.

The American people do not believe the corrupt, fake news anymore. They have ruined their reputation. But you know, it used to be that they'd argue with me. I'd fight. So I'd fight, they'd fight, I'd fight, they'd fight. Pop pop. You'd believe me, you'd believe them...But our fight against the big donors, big media, big tech, and others is just getting started. This is the greatest in history. There's never been a movement like that....And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.... So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give.... we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Of course Trump is indicted in the January 6 case not just for the Ellipse speech but for the planning that had gone into it since December 2020, the other forms of conspiracy involving his lawyers and election officials all over the US, and the fake elector scheme. He didn't simply "leave the White House" when Biden was inaugurated, either; he slunk out earlier, with his enormous trove of stolen documents, some of them highly classified. 

If Vance wants to talk about democracy, I'd like to know how he squares that with his intellectual attachment to his openly monarchist pal Curtis Yarvin:

In September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.

To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things...”

The censorship issue seems not to be connected to Harris, though she has been accused of advocating censorship in a 2019 interview with Jake Tapper, when she said it had been a good idea for Twitter to take down Trump's account, which the company (pre-Musk) accused of "glorification of violence" after January 6:

she replied: “We're talking about a private corporation, Twitter, that has terms of use, and as far as I'm concerned and I think most people would say, including members of Congress who he has threatened, that he has lost his privileges and it should be taken down."

Rather (according to Lauren Feiner at The Verge), Vance is talking about a case from the fever swamps of rightwing paranoia, the case of Murthy v. Missouri, originally Missouri v. Biden, in which Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt sued the Biden administration for having, as he alleged, pressured social media companies to suppress conservative views and criticism of the administration. This was filed in the aftermath of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and assigning Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger to write up an investigation of how this had been done at Twitter itself, which turned out, as you might have expected, to be garbage (it was true that the government had occasionally given Twitter advice about whether a particular account was violating Twitter's rules, but Twitter was under no obligation to follow the advice and frequently did not), but the rabid conservatives (including Jim Hoft the Gateway Pundit, who was a party to the suit) were convinced that they had a sacred liberty to make Facebook publish things that Facebook thought were misinformation, such as a story on Hunter Biden's laptop (believed to be a product of a Russian hack-and-leak operation, which I still think it is), anti-vaccination information on measles in Samoa (if I'm not mistaken that's the case in which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a role in responsibility for the 2019 deaths of 79 people, almost all of them children under 15), and stories questioning the effectiveness of masking and vaccination against Covid-19. 

I think the "lab leak" hypothesis on the origin of Covid was mentioned too (conclusive evidence of the zoonotic origin of the virus found in a Wuhan wet market was just published this week, as it happens).

The Supreme Court eventually threw the case out on the issue of standing, in a 6-3 ruling with Amy Coney Barrett writing the opinion, and the troglodytes Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting, but Barrett also offered a sharply worded critique of the case's fact finding:

...Justice Barrett, taking a cue from a particularly forceful and blunt government reply brief on a series of outright falsehoods in the record, delved deep into that factual record to show the paucity of facts to meet the burden that the plaintiffs had to shoulder in order to prevail. As to each plaintiff, she showed the dearth of facts to support that any action taken by the private media companies was a result of executive branch action. She also noted, “The Fifth Circuit relied on the District Court’s factual findings, many of which unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous.”

Suggesting that if the plaintiffs could be found to have standing she'd have thrown the case out anyway, 

Vance in the debate lays the whole thing on Kamala Harris, as if she were President Biden, Surgeon General Murthy, and Justice Barrett all at the same time, the one who's "engaged in censorship on an industrial scale...on Covid and other issues"—of course that's another lie, she isn't any of them—and objects to it all on the same peculiar terms as the ones we started with, arguing that false statements are not only permissible under the First Amendment (which I wouldn't dispute), but that they're a positive good for the "debate in the public square".

And then what's that weird sentence about "Americans casting aside lifelong friendships because of disagreements over politics" doing in there? (I'm wondering if it has something to do with his trans law school friend Sofia Nelson, who seems to have broken with him over his extraordinary dishonesty, the hurtful things he says as a Trumpy that he knew were wrong when they were friends, and probably still knows they're wrong, as she's exposed in some very sad detail.)

It's another defense of lying, like the ones quoted from him at the top of this post, as a necessary element of democratic discourse, because "conservative views" can't be properly expressed without misinformation, whether the Haitian cat-eating or the Haitian illegality, and so on. If you won't put up with his lying, he's kind of openly saying, you can't have a conversation with him at all.