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Why Do Americans Trust Either Trump or Harris?

Americans need to free themselves from the mental slavery arising from their indoctrination into the state religion.

Aug 27, 2024 | 22 comments

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Then US Senator Kamala Harris speaking at an event in Iowa on August 9, 2019 (Photo by Gage Skidmore/Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)

As I’m sure you all know, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has suspended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. Among those applauding this move, the idea seems to be that perhaps Trump will appoint Kennedy to some role in his administration in which Kennedy might have a positive impact on the health of the US childhood population. But this is a leap of faith as far as I have seen. And it’s not like Trump kept his campaign promises to “drain the swamp”, etc., during his first term in office.

Meanwhile, with the Democratic establishment no longer able to pretend as though Joe Biden’s cognitive decline is a mere figment of Republicans’ imagination, given his embarrassing debate performance with Trump in June, Democrats are rallying around their party’s replacement candidate; and suddenly we are supposed to perceive Vice President Kamala Harris as an inspirational embodiment of American ideals and values, a shining beacon of wisdom and righteousness, and, weirdly, a source of “joy”.

Why “joy” was chosen as part of Harris’s public relations campaign is a mystery to me, beyond the obvious reason that “hope” and “change” had already been used by previous candidates in ways that would risk their mindless repetition being much more widely recognized as meaningless rhetoric by sensible Americans who do not have selective amnesia about the empty campaign slogans of the past.

But what is particularly informative about it is how the media have adopted the word “joy” in their coverage of Harris’s campaign and passed it off as though we were all too stupid to recognize it as a talking point of an organized propaganda campaign. (And, well, sadly, many Americans do seem incapable of catching on to how they are being manipulated by the thought-controlling news media all reading off the same script.)

As an example of the mindless slavish devotion to the political establishment, a recent New York Times opinion piece credits Harris with envisioning “a more holistic and entirely new story about how the economy works and the aims it should serve.”

So, suddenly, Kamala Harris is an expert on the economy!

Never mind how she has blamed the problem of price inflation on businesses engaging in “price gouging”, thus deflecting from its true primary cause, which was the trillions of dollars that the Federal Reserve created out of thin air in order to rob us all of our purchasing power in service to the state, by monetizing the debt incurred as a result of the government’s insane and criminal policy of deliberately shutting down the economy in response to the COVID‑19 pandemic, with the endgame of that policy from the start having been coerced mass vaccination.

Harris is economically illiterate, but here she is being characterized as some kind of visionary who is going to educate us all about how the economy really functions, and we are supposed to believe that her proposed policies are really in our own best interests. Never mind that it’s not actually very clear what those policies might be—it’s all so very vague.

The insult to any thinking person’s intelligence is just too much to bear. The most specific the Times article gets is to say she proposes “using trillions of dollars in public investment to simulate private dollars”, including with the aim of building three million new homes.

But “public investment” is just the usual code phrase for the forcible expropriation of our wealth for redistribution according to the whims of clueless politicians.

It’s the usual code for saying that Harris aims to continue increasing the public debt, which the Fed will monetize since Americans would never agree to any of this if they were directly taxed to pay for it all; and which debt monetization will effect the continued upward transfer of wealth from all of us peons to the ruling class of politically connected financial elites, while concurrently causing even further malinvestment and distortions of the market, resulting in unsustainable booms followed by the inevitable busts that are the necessary market corrections; and which corrections the Fed, as always, will try to prevent by doing even more of what caused the problems in the first place only on an ever greater scale.

It was the government and its partner in crime, the Federal Reserve, that caused the housing affordability crisis. Therefore, even more government interference in the housing market cannot possibly be the solution. The obvious solution is rather to get the government out of the housing market—and out of interfering harmfully in every other aspect of our lives, too, for that matter.

The key lesson neither Harris nor the Times will tell you, because they are too indoctrinated into the state religion to be able to comprehend its simplicity, is that the government cannot legislate away the law of supply and demand. Price fixing, including the Fed’s manipulation of interest rates, is the cause of so many problems and never the cure. Any government interference in our lives that results in an absence of true market prices is always and ever accompanied by harmful consequences that may be unintended but are hardly unforeseeable.

The key lesson the politicians and pundits will never explain to you is that government bureaucrats making decisions at best arbitrarily, assuming only benevolent intent and an absence of corruption (which is a dubious assumption, indeed), do not know better than the market with its pricing system how to efficiently allocate scarce resources towards productive ends as determined by the will of consumers, which is to say, by all of us. There is no more perfect manifestation of the democratic principle than the free market. We do not need the government to take care of us and to tell us what to do. Incessant government interference in our lives is neither necessary nor desirable!

The author of the Times article ludicrously argues that “markets, left on their own, often tend to concentrate power”, resulting in “fewer options, worse service, higher prices, lower pay, less innovation and generally less control of our economic lives”.

But that is exactly backwards. All of those harmful outcomes are precisely the outcome of government interventionism and our consequent inability to engage in voluntary exchange for mutual benefit absent harmful government interference. People think they live in “the land of the free”, but a free society is logically impossible when you have a government that will not allow any aspect of our lives remain un-interfered with.

This goes back to that point about how Kamala Harris is somehow going to enlighten us with her economic vision while blaming price inflation on corporate greed instead of properly informing Americans how the inflation, including the insanity in the housing market, was the natural and inevitable result of the COVID‑19 lockdown madness and the Fed’s response of dutifully monetizing the debt resulting from the government’s efforts to paper over the harmful economic consequences of that insane exercise in authoritarian governance.

The corporate greed we really need to be concerned about is that which leads corporations to try to circumvent market forces and instead utilize government force to achieve their financial aims, like the pharmaceutical industry. The problem is not that there is “corporate capture” of government agencies like the FDA and CDC but that such government agencies exist to be captured and utilized to advance the agenda of a few at the expense of everyone else.

But you don’t see Kamala Harris talking about that type of corporate greed, for the obvious reason. Who do you think she really aims to serve? Hmm? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not us. She’s all about serving the special interests that keep clueless politicians like her in power.

And to come back to Trump for a moment, let’s not forget how the lockdowns were implemented during his term in office; how he bragged about being responsible for “Operation Warp Speed” and the consequent treatment of the entire population as subjects of a mass uncontrolled experiment without informed consent; how his administration rolled out “stimulus” packages to try to paper over the harmful consequences of deliberately shutting down the economy, dramatically increasing the government debt and predictably resulting in a massive theft of our purchasing power (not “transitory” price inflation, mind you); how he treated Russia as an enemy despite campaign promises to pursue friendlier relations, pursued extreme Zionist policies in his support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, and otherwise continued a basically neo-con foreign policy agenda; how he promised to “drain the swamp” but then kept people like Dr. Anthony Fauci in positions of power such as, in Fauci’s case, the president’s chief medical adviser; etc.

And while Trump and other Republicans eventually came around to opposition, Democrats, of course, were even more insanely pro-lockdown, and they remain unapologetic to the extraordinary harm caused by this authoritarianism, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that instead of acknowledging the real problem and cause of the housing affordability crisis, all we get from Harris’s admirers is the usual gibberish about how she will fix the problems caused by too much freedom in the marketplace with “public investment”, i.e., forcibly expropriating the fruits of your labor for redistribution according to her whims because you, dear peasant, are too stupid to know how to spend your own money and therefore need Kamala Harris and her ilk to decide how to spend it for you.

Then there is the matter of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been supported by the Biden/Harris administration, would have been likewise supported by Trump had he been reelected, and has been defended by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., thus rendering vacuous his claim to be a defender of children and human rights.

During the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that Harris has been “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza”, which was certainly news to everyone actually paying attention to this issue.

But even if we assume for the sake of argument that it is true that she has been “tirelessly” involved in the Biden administration’s efforts, all that would mean is that Harris is totally on board with Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide.

Sure, we’ve heard since last year that the Biden administration has been working toward a ceasefire. But what that has really meant is that the administration worked tirelessly to provide Israel with the arms it has needed to perpetrate a genocide, to block ceasefire resolutions in the UN Security Council, and to announce a supposedly Israel-backed “ceasefire” proposal for the purpose of shifting the blame for the absence of a ceasefire onto Hamas when the truth is that the regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear from the start that it would not agree to ending its genocidal military campaign before achieving the stated aim of eliminating Hamas, only to a temporary pause involving an exchange of hostages, which is to be followed by a continuation of Israel’s criminal violence.

Agreeing to its own destruction along with the continued destruction of Gaza and indiscriminate massacre of Palestinian civilians is obviously a non-starter for Hamas, the antithesis of an actual ceasefire, and Israel has otherwise been making demands clearly intended to ensure that no ceasefire can be achieved. And the Biden/Harris administration cannot possibly be incognizant of how their “tireless” efforts to achieve a ceasefire have in fact been facilitating Israel’s genocide, but, you see, the narcissists, megalomaniacs, sociopaths, and psychopaths who exercise government power over you think that you are just too stupid to see through their ridiculous pretenses of benevolent intent.

Everyone participating in the US presidential election is, by the act of voting, legitimizing the outcome, which any sane person can foresee will be the perpetuation of the criminal activities of the regime in Washington, DC. For Americans to place faith in either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to change this course for the country is completely irrational. It is up to free-thinking, rational Americans to effect real change, and a good first step would be to stop legitimizing your own disenfranchisement, consenting to servitude, and perpetuating the regime’s criminal violence and human rights violations.

About Jeremy R. Hammond

About Jeremy R. Hammond

I am an independent journalist dedicated to exposing state propaganda designed to manufacture consent for criminal government policies. I provide deeply researched analyses on critical issues including US foreign policy, the economy, and health freedom.

I am a Research Fellow at The Libertarian Institute and author. My books include Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and The War on Informed Consent.

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  • Liz says:

    I respect and appreciate your pov.
    I voted for third party candidates in 2016 + 2020.
    This election however will be different for me. I, like RFKJ, believe that the single most important threat to our democracy is the extreme censorship that has been perpetrated upon us. Our civil liberties have been illegally stripped. For me, governmental collusion with big tech, big pharma, along with censorship of legitimate scientific voices, needs to take precedence this election cycle.

    • Ida Hansen says:

      Do you still like RFKJ after he has come out in support of convicted felon Trump? What do you think of Harris vs Trump vs Stein and other Third Party candidates? -)

      • JdL says:

        “convicted felon Trump”

        Is it possible that you are not aware that these charges are (as it were) trumped up and worthy only of a banana republic? And no, I’m not a Trump fan, just a fan of actual justice, not a transparently phony facsimile.

      • Hi Ida,

        I began publicly speaking out against Bobby’s candidacy in November 2023, after it became clear to me that he was intent on trying to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I would have liked to think that my distaste for Bobby’s endorsement of Trump was evident enough in this article, but the fact that you are asking this question tells me I didn’t make that clear enough. That said, Trump’s conviction has nothing to do with my point of view. Had this conviction never occurred, my view on this would remain the same. As for third party candidates like Jill Stein, while I do not find her or any alternatives worthy of my vote for various reasons, I can respect a decision to vote third party if for no other reason than an act of defiance against the two-party establishment.

    • Hi Liz.

      I do not disagree with your selected priorities. I also do not perceive the conclusion logically following from that starting point that we should therefore vote for X candidate. So, as far as I can see, you and I are in perfect agreement! 😊

  • Ida Hansen says:

    Great observations, Jeremy. But since you are already out on a limb (much appreciated), why not go a little further by First — stating what you personally plan to do on 5 November. Will you vote for Trump, Harris, or Stein — or not vote at all? And Second — sharing what you believe are the top pros and cons (i.e., your informal risk analysis) of each of the four preceding choices — with regard to the US and the rest of the world, socially, economically, and environmentally. Thank you.

    • Hi Ida,

      I apologize if it was not clear enough from this article, but as I have previously explained publicly, I will not be voting. Please see in particular this conversation with Bretigne Shaffer in which we explain why not voting is the most socially responsible thing you can do:

      https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/2024/08/07/why-americans-should-stop-voting/

      • Rosa Demanins says:

        I know your position on not voting, but I still see the danger of that being interpreted as apathy. When voting is the only voice a citizen has in a democracy, it is important that that voice be heard, by destroying one’s ballot if one doesn’t like either-or party. That means not voting electronically because, obviously, one can’t destroy an electronic ballot. Just imagine what could happen if one third or more of the ballots coming in were destroyed. Hopefully someone would pay attention.

      • I still see the danger of that being interpreted as apathy.

        The fact that others might misinterpret my position is not a reason for me to sway from my position. As for the idea of destroying ballots, that also means not voting, and given the widespread use of electronic voting machines, I am skeptical this strategy could be effective for sending a message to the regime. And we can also imagine what would happen if everyone just stopped participating in the system! That would be an even more powerful message, I think.

  • Guy Montag says:

    Ditto on Liz’s comment above.

    RFK’s endorsement speech “gave me permission” to go over to the “dark side of the force” (If you haven’t watched it in full, you need to do so). Back in June ’23, I was troubled by RFK’s fanatical support for Israel (when he threw Roger Waters under the bus). Since Oct 7th, I’ve been demoralized/disgusted by RFK’s support for turning Gaza into a desert and calling it peace (and his refusal to listen to others such as Jeremy).

    Trump is an egotistical, narcissitic ass. But, he likes to make deals and I believe (despite his bombastic rhetoric) he would be a better bet to avoid WW3 in Ukraine or the Middle East (remember, during his administration, he stepped back from the brink of war in Syria & Iran) and bring an end to the Gaza horror show. Others have made this argument in more detail (see Triti Parsi’s recent interview on Brianna Joy Gray’s “Bad Faith” podcast and Scott Ritter’s Substack). I’m not going to vote for Harris who’s been sending the bombs to flatten Gaza.

    If I didn’t live in the swing state of Michigan, I’d vote for Jill Stein in a heartbeat (last week while in Chicago, I saw her speak at a rally with “Workers Strike Back).” She is sincere and right on nearly all issues. Previously, I always voted for Perot or Nader or Stein. I knocked on hundreds of doors for the Bernie campaign in ’16 & ’20. But, in ’20, I held my nose and voted for Biden (who I supposed was the “lesser evil”).

    This year, I’ll hold my nose and mark my ballot for Trump. Not for the man or the Republican party. RFK is full of BS on Israel, but he has been right on the lack of vaccine safety and the industrial state censorship that is killing our democracy and stripping us of our civil liberties. I will vote for the hope & chance (IF, as RFK noted, Trump keeps his word “this time”) FOR peace and FOR RFK to attempt to “make America healthy again.”

    Hopefully, my wife doesn’t leave me over my vote!

  • Diane says:

    Since I’m not in a swing state, and since RFK, Jr. made it on to our ballot, I will vote for him (and would have done so as a write-in anyway). Though international politics and relations are important, I believe saving America’s health system —and especially the kids— is far more urgent. I do not have faith that Trump would honor his words to RFK, Jr, as he already went back on promises to him when he won in 2016. I also do not believe that RFK, Jr. suspended his campaign because of this possible partnership. I believe that he realized that if he ended up contributing to a Harris win, it would devastate him morally. How he can justify his stance on Gaza I do not know… how any of them can is a mystery to me.

    • Indeed, it is a mystery how any of them can justify their defense of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. My view is that there are certain positions that ought to automatically disqualify any candidate from our consideration, no matter how great they may be on other issues, and that supporting a genocide is certainly one of them.

  • Jody says:

    Jeremy it is sad to see how powerfully deluded Americans are. Everyone lies to themself about history, the facts of what these politicians have done and the results of their actions. They lie to themselves about the lies their preferred fake wrestling huckster has told, and they lie about the consequences of those lies, even as they live daily with the consequences. They intentionally refuse to do the math and put one and one together. In the end they will never blame themselves for facilitating and making possible their own entrapment, enslavement and destruction. That r vs d team koolaid hit is still just too good. Even after all these years. That sense of belonging. That sense of having done something. Winning! Such is the nature of a society that subsists on self delusion and lies. Destruction will be its appropriate reward.

    Humanity suffered massively for the first Trump presidency. Anyone who denies this is a liar or fantastically ignorant or some combination of the two. Leaving the botched abortion of domestic issues of the first Trump presidency aside –

    The U.S. invaded and militarily occupied Syria under his leadership as he bragged the U.S. was there to steal the oil. The U.S. continues to occupy Syrian territory to this day, partially to steal resources, partially to interfere with Syrian agriculture, but all of it to engage in war crimes against Syria and make sure the nation can not recover from the devastation the U.S. visited on those people, for no ostensible reason other than the Greater Israel Project. Trump owns the distinction of being the first president to provide offensive weapons to Ukraine, as he increased facilitation of the slaughter of ethnic Russians there, and did everything possible to be certain Russia would be provoked to deal with the burgeoning security crisis on its border, resulting in the proxy war the U.S. wages there now. As a small side note, his abandonment of the nuclear arms treaty (inf) ensures every American is now that much closer to experiencing the profound maga benefit of incinerated obsolescence. Trump ordered the murder of an Iranian man while on diplomatic mission, who was perhaps the most loved military and political figure of that nation. Coincidentally, this man Trump murdered was also the single individual most responsible for defeating the U.S. proxy army shock troops in Syria and Iraq, also known as ISIS. If not for the tremendous restraint of the more civilized and circumspect Iranian leadership, this reckless crime easily could have begun a third world war, and plunged all of humanity into the abyss. This is just a tiny sliver of the sordid history of the first presidency of peace candidate Donald Trump, all occurring quite recently. If I were to list all of his presidential war crimes, lies, betrayals, displays of abject ignorance and or incompetence, contradictions, and appointments, decisions and policies that continued and accelerated the destruction of life, freedoms, autonomy, prosperity – leaving aside his burning down of the tattered remnants of this constitutional republic, it would require a book. Yet the self deluded r team faithful can not allow themselves to remember, let alone contemplate these things.

    Or, they may fess up to all of it and just go with the time honored, fail proof, iron clad classic:

    Lesser of two evils.

    This is the argument ending, 100% completion rate hail Mary, to be broken out when nothing else works. These 4 words finally dissolve responsibility, morality and logic into a warm bath of comfortable delusion. Lesser of two evils. So nice.

    All our owners have to do is put an image up on the screen of whichever r or d team marionette is the villain of the day, put the corresponding nazi, or marxist trigger word there, and all fall straight in line and hurry up to get out the vote for the soul of the nation, at the next fake election.
    Weren’t we told that Pavlov did his experiments on dogs?

    The ruse works.

    Every single time.

    Cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle.

    Lucy. Football. Charlie Brown.

    Over and over and over again. The glazed eyes mantra mouthed mindlessly ad nauseam. Decade after decade. Lesser of two evils. Lesser of two evils. Lesser of two evils. And who could have guessed? Evil kept growing. By my estimation, this society, and what its government accomplishes in the world, is defined by evil.

    Then, during the presidency of whichever r or d team, zog selected ham sandwich, the respective r or d team winners, whose fake wrestling champion adorns the seat of glory, reliably weep and wail at the naked disregard for their stated wishes, the instantly abandoned campaign slogans, the betrayals, the harms, the entrapment, the enslavement, the destruction. They loudly proclaim, I will never vote for him again! Sometimes they even wax apostate, and proclaim, I will never vote r team (or d) again! But come time for the big presidential 4 year show, they prove themselves liars. Again.

    And again.

    And again.

    The koolaid still hits. It’s just too good.

    Even after fake elections are conducted out in the open in front of the entire world and the nations nose rubbed in it for four years with a fake presidency demonstrated through a man who can’t walk or speak, doesn’t know who or where he is, when it’s time for the big presidential show, the intoxicated electorate cries out – vote harder! We saw it on Fox news and MSNBC and Dan Bongino and Newsmax and Rachel Maddow and CNN and everywhere! This is the most important election of our lifetimes! Vote harder!!!

    We must vote HARDER!!!!!!!

    What a tragedy and farce this nation is, with its self deluded people.

    The dustbin awaits.

    I have to give our owners credit. This system they have devised is absolutely brilliant. Stunning in its simplicity, longevity and effectiveness. Their system will certainly outlast Western Civilization itself. But I guess that’s the point.

    • Lesser of two evils. And who could have guessed? Evil kept growing.

      Yup. That is the outcome of voting for evil!

      Why most Americans cannot see this is beyond my comprehension.

      • Jody says:

        Self delusion.

        Before the germ psy op of 2020 I attributed someone’s inability to perceive obvious truth to being uninformed, lazy, stupid.

        But what became crystal clear to me in those days was that IQ, education, ability, high function, had no bearing on an individual’s ability to perceive, much less accept, reality. I was surrounded by far more intelligent, capable and accomplished people than myself all behaving as if they had the intelligence of parrots. Clearly low IQ was not the explanation.

        Normalcy bias, a high degree of material comfort, an aversion to change that might be physically or psychologically uncomfortable, these are why.

        Put bluntly, people lie to themselves.

        The saying comes to mind (Upton Sinclair?) It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. You could exchange the word salary for comfort.

        Americans do not value freedom. That narrative is mythical. They value comfort. Even the poorest among us, by historical standards, are quite comfortable. (Think Huxley and soma) Being honest about the political system, the politicians they support, the entire structure of this society, would require substantial emotional and psychological discomfort, and the recognition that physical discomfort is coming, inevitably. Our society has no stomach for honesty and introspection on that level. Much, much easier, and more gratifying, to keep swigging the r vs d koolaid, shout lesser of two evils!, vote harder, and call it a day.

      • Indeed, the problem is not generally lack of intelligence but an unwillingness to use it!

  • Marg Galvin says:

    What do you suggest though, for everyone to not vote? Most people are slaves to political ideologies, they need people to love and hate.

  • Keen Observer says:

    I can uderstand your point, being an Anarchist myself. But I’m alsos a pragmatist, to whom it is evident that Trump has a big ego, and wants to go down in history as a savior, rather than destroyer, of American liberty, sovereignty, and health. Whereas I sincerely believe a Harris administration doesn’t give a shit, as long as they win the left vs. right cuture war… whatever it takes.

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