Month: August 2024

How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold, by Philipp Felsch, trans. Daniel Bowles (Cambridge: Polity, 2024), $29.95

The most learned man I know suggests a comic figure. He is bald, short, and excitable. He wears thick glasses. An idiosyncratic filler tic (“um-nyah”) punctuates his communication in, presumably, all 17 languages he knows. That Vittorio Hösle’s Morals and Politics ought to be more widely read in the United States is another way he reminds me of Timofey Pnin. He is also kind, wise, and deadly serious. When he habilitated at the tender age of 26, people made the inevitable comparisons to the youngest German philosopher to qualify for a professorship: Friedrich Nietzsche, at age 25.

Mention this earlier prodigy, however, and Hösle will shudder with disgust. He suggests a shower may be in order after reading Ecce Homo. His graduate class at the University of Notre Dame was my first encounter with vicarious embarrassment (of course the Germans have a word, Fremdscham) regarding Nietzsche. Some people cannot forget the enthusiasms of the Nazis and the young Benito Mussolini. Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s only sibling to survive into adulthood, selectively promoted anti-Semitic scrawlings among the papers that Nietzsche had left behind (his Nachlass). She pawned off others as his posthumous masterpiece, The Will to Power. Her presentation of the Nachlass was not seriously challenged until the postwar era. Philipp Felsch’s How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold begins here, at the nadir of this strange thinker’s reputation, and tells the curious story of its rehabilitation by two underappreciated Italian scholars. 

Felsch’s is strictly a European story. Americans are too affable, too blasé, or too credulous to have turned Nietzsche the cold shoulder, ever. At Princeton since the days of Walter Kaufmann, a dash of spiritual elitism is permissible to give style to your character; it even makes a salutary ingredient in the mix of democratic individualism. Didn’t Nietzsche have a lifelong respect for Ralph Waldo Emerson? At Chicago since the time of Leo Strauss, and in the many places Hannah Arendt taught, the brooding provocations of Martin Heidegger loom, and wasn’t it Nietzsche who made possible Heidegger’s overturning of metaphysics? But Baltimore first and foremost welcomes Nietzsche. Here H. L. Mencken wrote the first monograph on Nietzsche in English. And it was to Johns Hopkins that Richard Macksey and René Girard invited Jacques Derrida to introduce the “poststructuralist” Nietzsche at a famous conference in 1966. Poststructuralist shenanigans at two Nietzsche conferences in France, the Royaumont colloquium (1964) and “Nietzsche adjourd’hui?” at Cerisy-la-Salle (1972), bookend Felsch’s reception history. Derrida and his colleagues make Nietzsche into a hero of playful textual vandalism. Nowhere is “the truth” or even the intentions of “the author” to be found, they argue, least of all in Nietzsche’s exposé of the will to truth as the will to power. Felsch’s main subjects are mostly ghosts at these banquets. During this time, Giorgio Colli (1917–1979) and Mazzino Montinari (1928–1986) were compiling a new critical edition of Nietzsche’s collected works, including his Nachlass, on the other side of the Iron Curtain in Weimar. Even as Derrida quotes their manuscripts, however, he mocks their painstaking philological effort. Seizing upon one marginal note, “I have forgotten my umbrella,” Derrida asks, does this jot belong to Nietzsche’s “works”? Is, he gibes, the forgotten umbrella a key to unlocking the “truth” of Nietzsche’s intent?

Felsch presents this Nietzsche reception history in the context of a love story between young men and philosophy. It begins at Ginnasio N. Machiavelli in Lucca in 1942. Colli is a charismatic 25 year-old high-school teacher. Montinari is a promising pupil of 14. Surprisingly, Colli’s obsession with Nietzsche chafes against the official fascist curriculum more radically than the liberal opposition. For while Benedetto Croce presented a rival understanding of Hegelian historicism (storicismo) to Giovanni Gentile’s, Nietzsche promised untimely thoughts, an escape from unfortunate times, and even philosophy as practiced by the ancient Greeks. Colli’s desire to overcome time-bound ideas and return to classical philosophy also struck Leo Strauss, another Nietzsche enthusiast from his youth, around the same time in New York. Now Nietzsche’s promise may or may not be a false one, since he may regard the “truths “ of the ancient thinkers as artistic expressions of their will to power. And some people also question the earnestness of Strauss’s return to timeless philosophical questions. But to anyone who has encountered the debates among and surrounding “Straussians,” the decades-long disagreements between Colli and Montinari, about the relationship between art and philosophy in general and over Nietzsche in particular, will sound familiar. 

According to Montinari, who would spend decades in Nietzsche’s archive, there is not an accidental phrase, word, or even punctuation mark in all of Nietzsche’s writings. “Logographic necessity” is the Straussian term for this inerrancy. If Colli and Montinari had taught in the United States, they might not stand out at Colgate, Keynon, or Carleton, where Strauss’s students insisted on the possibility of a return to philosophy, despite Nietzsche and Heidegger, by close readings of Plato and other worthies. And even Felsch, despite his close focus on Europe, cannot avoid citing Allan Bloom’s phrase (from The Closing of the American Mind) when Colli and Montinari bemoan the “Nietzscheanization of the Left”.

In all great philosophical love stories, like Nietzsche contra Wagner, the student overcomes the master. Does Montinari betray and outshine Colli? Felsch suggests that Montinari’s communism is a repudiation of his apolitical teacher. But this is complicated. Italian Communist Party membership is Montinari’s ticket to Weimar, in East Germany, where the Soviets had stashed the one hundred wooden crates of Nietzsche’s original papers. Archival research was good communist praxis in the party of Antonio Gramsci, with its critical focus on the cultural hegemony of the bourgeois class. The Soviet Union, too, was invested in cultural diplomacy in Italy. (On the other side of this cultural-diplomacy contest, Professor Hösle was born to the director of the Goethe-Institut in Milan and an Italian mother in 1960.) Before rededicating himself to Colli’s dream of bringing Nietzsche back to philosophical life, Montinari was the director of the communist-funded Centro Thomas Mann in Rome.

Both Colli and Montinari elevate artistic insight over the reigning philosophical opinions of the day. This is not exactly apolitical. Take Montinari’s favorite writer, Thomas Mann. Nietzsche inspires Mann to declare for aestheticism in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), which means the artist’s freedom from politics. Mann opposes German Kultur—the dark, passionate, even “Dionysian” world of life, love, and art—to the rational principles and socially conscious literature of Enlightenment Zivilisation. Artists have a prior responsibility to primal experience that cannot be historicized into a conscious story of bourgeois social progress. The non-political man turns out to be opposed to the progressive politics of the socialist Left and the liberal Right. The same impulse that brings Mann to the defense of the Kaiserreich during the First World War impels him, thirty years later, to defend blacklisted communist film directors in America. There are more loose ends of third-way political aestheticism than Felsch is able to sort out. Is Colli non-political in the sense of Mann, that is, aiming for something like Nietzsche’s aesthetically higher “great politics” that Germany can learn from classical Greece? Do Montinari’s communist sympathies go beyond this same aestheticism? Teacher and student, who are perhaps not so different politically, die as friends.

The power of art does not only confound philosophy and politics in these abstract ways, but also drives the narrative of the Nietzsche Boys, as they are nicknamed in Turin. It is crucial that the archive director in Weimar, Helmut Holtzhauer, is a man of culture. No communist official would have sanctioned archival work on Nietzsche’s decadent barbarism for any other reason. (I was at times reminded of the film The Lives of Others.) Of course, Montinari’s work on Nietzsche had to remain a secret within East Germany. Felsch’s narrative touches can be a little heavy-handed. He initially withholds the identities of a rival researcher and the Stasi informer who monitored Montinari, for example, though neither amounts to a plot twist.

Expectations of profound insights in Nietzsche’s unpublished writings bring Heidegger closer to the Nietzsche Boys than the supercilious Derrida. Yet Heidegger’s insistence that The Will to Power is Nietzsche’s masterpiece makes him an anachronism who was unlikely to appreciate Montinari’s only book, The Will to Power Does Not Exist. Colli and Montinari do not strike gold in the Nietzsche archives. Felsch’s story is one of underappreciated scholarly labors.

If there is gold among Nietzsche’s unpublished letters, for me, it is a remark to his friend Erwin Rohde in 1869. This remark was collected in Montinari’s 1977 edition of Nietzsche’s letters, and it is singled out by the contemporary German philosopher Byung-Chul Han to show just how far this philosopher of the will to power searched for what is beyond power. “Outside the windows, there lies the autumn… which I love as much as my very best friends because it is so mature and unconsciously without a wish,” Nietzsche writes, “It does not desire anything for itself and it gives everything of itself.” These are the contradictory insights, despite Professor Hösle’s apotropaics, that draw young people into this strange love story of art and philosophy.

The post The Nietzsche Boys appeared first on The American Conservative.

For me, the surest sign of the imminent arrival of autumn is not the changing light, the cooler temperatures, or the ads touting pumpkin-spice flavors. 

No, the pending change of seasons is surely marked by the arrival, in the mornings and in the afternoons, of school buses—as unique a sight as the “long shining line” of undergraduate-bearing station wagons that Don DeLillo wrote about so memorably in the opening pages of his novel White Noise.

Yet the sight of school buses does not inspire nostalgia in me as much as relief and even gratitude. Here I must admit one of the great blessings of my life: I have essentially no firsthand experience with school buses.

For the first few years of my educational career, my parents sent me to a private school that expected its students to be delivered by their parents each morning and picked up by their parents each afternoon. (In my three-decade-old recollection, I think my school eventually gained access to a single small school bus, but in my day it was mainly used for field trips.)

Back in the early 1990s, working moms were not the norm, at least among my peers, so it was entirely reasonable for my school to assume that they would be available for this chore. In fact, reflecting on it now, the expectation that moms would be available to drive their kids to and from school is not very different—or any more outrageous—than the expectation that moms would serve their kids breakfast: Each is well within the mainstream of parental duties, but neither is any longer assumed by the public-education bureaucracy. As the late, great National Review Washington editor Kate O’Beirne once said, discussing the “sacred cows” of the federal school breakfast and lunch programs on a Hudson Institute panel: “What poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana?”

I digress.

In my case, it was not my mother but my father who drove me to and from school every day through the second grade, and, to help pass the time on our daily sojourns, we would count the number of school buses we happened to pass en route to school. I cannot be certain of this, but I think we would remember the number counted from one day to the next. What can I say? I was 8 years old, and it amused me.

Even at that age, though, I recognized that being free to count school buses—rather than compelled to ride on one of them—made me one of the lucky ones: I was not among those unfortunate youngsters whose parents were so determined to acclimate them to the world that they not only subjected them to public schools but to a form of public transportation to get there. I knew I had it better sitting in the passenger seat of my parents’ Volvo (or whatever car we owned at that point) than sitting in what I assumed was a stuffy cauldron of loud, rude and raucous kids.

This may strike some as unbearably elitist, but I now see the real risks of parents relying on school buses: This teaches the child to depend on a public service for a basic need—surely a “lesson” that leads to increasing reliance on the state. I am not ignorant of practical considerations, but if a parent is really, truly unable to convey their offspring to school, why not make use of a carpool? That, at least, teaches the child to rely on friends and neighbors. And, if physically possible, the child simply walking to school would send the message that he can rely on himself. Better that than counting on the school bus driver.

That Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz toiled for so long in the public-education system is a cause for great worry: Walz presumably places great faith in teachers, football coaches, and, indeed, school bus drivers—a misplaced faith in public officials that ought to reside within the family unit. 

As for me, I was homeschooled starting in the third grade, so the entire school bus issue was rendered moot. I no longer counted them or paid much attention to them, though if I happened to hear one pull up on our street near the 3 o’clock hour, I said a tiny prayer of thanks that I was already home, happily reading a novel by John Updike or John Cheever or listening to CDs of Mussorgsky or Stravinsky, rather than lugging a heavy backpack off the bus.

In Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan, one character refers to “public transportation snobs”—people who see their use of buses or other means of public conveyance as a sign of their own virtue. I am the opposite. I see nothing inherently good or noble in the taking of a bus. To the contrary, I consider parents transporting their own kids to school to be a healthy sign of familial involvement in childrearing and an entirely salutary resistance to the state.

The post Confessions of a Private Transportation Snob appeared first on The American Conservative.

Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, by Marc Fasteau and Ian Fletcher. 849 pages with index. Cambridge University Press 2024.

Although many (including this writer) will reject its conclusions, Fasteau and Fletcher’s compendium, Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, will serve as the standard reference work on industrial policy in the foreseeable future. Its 800 pages provide a thorough survey of all the major economies’ experience with government planning, including a sober assessment of successes and failures. They rightly emphasize the key role of military R&D. Nonetheless, they miss the trees for the forest, so to speak—namely, the singular contributions of maverick inventors. Innovation can’t be budgeted and scheduled, only fostered and encouraged. And that depends on a delicate balance between government support and private initiative.

The authors want the government to remake the economy, with a new corps of federal officials empowered to direct investment to favored industries. In their enthusiasm, they ignore the gross deficiencies of the most ambitious piece of industrial policy in decades, namely the Biden CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. And they naively propose a devaluation of the U.S. dollar to promote exports without considering the ways in which cheapening the currency adversely affects manufacturing. 

“In 2021 and 2022, Biden proposed and Congress enacted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act (BIA), the CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). These ambitious new programs, combined with their explicitly pro-industrial policy rationales, were a big step forward,” the authors write. They worry that the $170 billion CHIPS Act wasn’t big enough: “The Act was a major advance, but the aid it provides, while sizeable, is dwarfed by that provided by Taiwan, Korea, and China.”

The CHIPS Act subsidies prompted $450 billion in planned investments, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, but the industry encountered crippling shortages of skilled labor, engineers, and infrastructure. The cost of building new industrial plants jumped by 30 percent in little more than a year, and unfilled construction job openings jumped to an all-time record in 2023. Plant openings by TSMC, Samsung, and other fabricators were delayed by years. Intel took $8.5 billion in subsidies under the CHIPS Act and shortly thereafter laid off 15,000 workers and cut capital expenditures by 20 percent.

The CHIPS Act turned out to be a horrible example of how industrial policy can go wrong. Apart from its shoddy implementation, Biden’s venture into industrial policy failed to encourage research into new semiconductor technologies that promise increases of computing speed by orders of magnitude. The authors discuss molecular electronics, which, if successful, will create circuits from individual molecules rather than silicon wafers, but do not mention the absence of support for such technologies in the CHIPS Act.

Perhaps the serried ranks of federal officials proposed by the authors would have foreseen these bottlenecks, but Fasteau and Fletcher did not. The term “skilled labor” appears just five times in the book and only once with reference to the United States. American manufacturers invariably cite the lack of skilled personnel as the single biggest constraint on expansion. A worker with a high school diploma and a year’s training can earn $60,000 a year operating a computer-controlled machine, but this work requires proficiency in high-school math (for example, trigonometry). Less than a quarter of American high school students are rated proficient, according to the Department of Education, and they aren’t looking for factory work.

The authors mention Germany’s apprenticeship system as an element of that country’s industrial policy, but are silent about the abysmal state of American secondary education. High schools used to teach industrial skills; I still have the draftsman set my father used at a Brooklyn public school before starting as a machinist’s apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Nor do Fasteau and Fletcher mention that just seven percent of US undergraduates major in engineering, vs. a third in China, which now graduates 1.2 million engineers each year, vs. 200,000 in the United States. They provide detailed reports of university programs in quantum computing and nanotechnology, but ignore the biggest single problem now facing American industry.

The role of the military in promoting innovation is a central theme in their account. “The shadow of Mars is long,” they observe. “The Englishman Henry Bessemer,” who invented modern steelmaking, “had been trying to make a cannon strong enough to fire new rifled artillery shells.” They rightly draw attention to the national security imperative in inspiring innovation, but their account has an important lacuna.

A set of breakthroughs in the 1970s—optical networks, CMOS manufacturing of integrated circuits, and the Internet, among others—that launched the Digital Age. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work explained:

In 1973, the Yom Kippur War provided dramatic evidence of advances in surface-to-air missiles, and Israel’s most advanced fighters, flown by the top pilots in the Middle East, if not among the world’s best, lost their superiority for at least three days due to a SAM belt. And Israeli armored forces were savaged by ATGMs, antitank guided munitions.

U.S. analysts cranked their little models and extrapolated that [if] the balloon went up in Europe’s central front and we had suffered attrition rates comparable to the Israelis, U.S. tactical air power would be destroyed within 17 days, and NATO would literally run out of tanks.

Vietnam fell two years later, and the American military went back to the drawing boards. By 1978, advances in chip manufacturing put into the cockpits of fighter planes computers that could run lookdown radar. By 1982, American avionics helped Israel to destroy the Syrian air force in the Beqaa Valley “turkey shoot.”

Their account of the role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other government agencies in promoting industrial innovation is extensive, although it misses some decisive points.

Part of the problem is that federal R&D funding has shrunk as a share of government spending and GDP. “Federally funded R&D—the spending that generates fundamental technological breakthroughs—peaked at 1.9 percent of GDP in 1962, fell to 0.7 percent by 2020, and as of mid-2024 is only at the beginning of a possible turnaround,” they note. DARPA funding made possible Sergei Brin and Larry Page’s Google search algorithm, the voice recognition system later branded as Apple’s Siri, the Internet, the analog-to-digital transformation that enabled the smartphone, as well as GPS, stealth technology, night vision, smart weapons and a vast number of other innovations.

When the U.S. military is compelled to innovate as a matter of national security, it funds research at the frontier of physics. This puts technology in the hands of entrepreneurs who want to create new products. The Achilles’ heel of industrial policy is rent-seeking by corporations. When technology changes incrementally, industry easily corrupts the officials responsible for doling out federal money by offering them future employment. But when national security demands breakthroughs at the frontier of physics, entrepreneurs gain access to technology that challenges the existing business structure. That is what happened during the 1980s, when startups like Cisco, Intel, Apple, and Oracle became the new corporate giants.

Federal bureaucrats do a poor job of picking winners in the business world, and they don’t do a good job of forecasting technological breakthroughs, either. Although virtually every important innovation of the Digital Age began with DARPA funding, the most important of these inventions had little to do with the initial motivation for the project. An example related by Dr. Henry Kressel, the former head of RCA Labs, is the semiconductor laser: The military wanted to illuminate battlefields for night fighting. Kressel and his team took DARPA’s money and perfected a laser that could transmit vast quantities of information through optical cables, making the Internet possible. 

Maverick engineers with a mind of their own rather than federal planners discovered the most important innovations. The great corporate labs at RCA, IBM, GE, and the Bell System formed half of a public-private partnership, in which the government paid for basic research, but private capital took the risk of commercialization. 

Fasteau and Fletcher draw attention to America’s declining share of manufacturing in GDP and its widening trade deficit. They propose withdrawing from the World Trade Organization, rejecting any new free trade agreements, and raising tariffs, along with a devaluation of the U.S. dollar. They caution against disruptive, sudden action:

Tariff rate quotas and tariffs phased in over time should be used to nurture industries the U.S. is attempting to develop, is in danger of losing, or is trying to regain. For example, the federal government’s current $54 billion effort to rebuild U.S. capability in semiconductors should be supported by a staged tariff and quota policy. Said policy should track along with and protect the development of American production capacity, but not prematurely burden US users of advanced chips that domestic manufacturers are not yet capable of making.

Caution is called for indeed, given that we now import most of our capital goods. To reduce dependence on imports, we must invest in new capacity, which means increasing imports of capital goods for some years before replacing them with domestic production in the future. 

Less convincing is the authors’ plaidoyer for a cheap dollar. The steepest decline in manufacturing employment in U.S. history occurred during the 2000s while the US dollar’s real effective exchange rate fell sharply. That does not imply that a falling dollar caused the decline in employment, but rather that more important factors were at work. Perhaps the most important price point in capital-intensive investment is the cost of capital itself. Stable currencies generally are associated with a low cost of capital, because currency depreciation promotes inflation, and inflation adds both a surcharge and a risk premium to the cost of capital. 

When corporations write investments off taxable income over years, inflation reduces the value of depreciation, and thus increases the effective corporate tax rate. For that matter, Fasteau and Fletcher praise Japan’s use of accelerated depreciation to promote investment, but have nothing to say about the subject as it might apply to the United States. Tax relief for investment might prove a more effective incentive for manufacturing investment than tariffs. 

Despite these flaws, Industrial Policy for the United States belongs in the library of every policymaker concerned about the state of U.S. industry. 

The post Missing the Trees for the Forest in Industrial Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Black Californians are expressing their outrage.

Two reparations bills, championed by Democrat Sen. Steven Bradford, are facing an uphill battle in the final days of California’s legislative session.

The bills, Senate Bills 1403 and 1331, aimed at creating a new state agency and fund to facilitate reparations for the descendants of enslaved African Americans, have encountered significant resistance from an unexpected source: Governor Gavin Newsom himself.

For context, California never had slavery within its state.

The push for reparations gained momentum earlier this year when the California Legislature’s Black Caucus introduced a slate of 14 bills, according to California Matters.

However, Sen. Bradford, who has been a vocal advocate on the issue and a member of the state’s reparations task force, took a more ambitious approach with his legislation.

His bills propose the establishment of the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency, which would assist Black Californians in researching their genealogy, confirming their eligibility for reparations, and expediting their claims.

The governor’s office, which has remained tight-lipped about its stance, has reportedly raised concerns about the financial implications of the bills, The Sacramento Bee reported.

Newsom’s administration attempted to water down Bradford’s proposal by suggesting that, rather than creating the new agency, the state should authorize California State University to further “study” the issue and recommend a process for determining eligibility.

This move has sparked outrage among advocates and Black leaders who argue that the state has already spent four years studying reparations and that it is time for action, not more delays.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that the committee wants $5 million in taxpayer funds just to come up with a plan for reparations.

With California recently closing a $47 billion budget deficit, the administration is wary of the potential costs associated with implementing a reparations program.

Latina California Republican Kate Sanchez expressed her concerns, highlighting the staggering potential costs associated with reparations—estimated at up to $800 billion.

“That is two and a half times the size of our entire state budget,” Sanchez argued. “To pay for that would require a tax hike unlike anything we’ve seen before.”

Black residents are voicing their anger and disappointment, with some issuing direct warnings to Newsom.

“The governor needs to understand that the world is watching California, and this is going to have a direct impact on your friend, Kamala Harris, who’s running for President,” one resident said. “Pull up the bills now, vote on them, and sign them… We have been waiting for 400 years.”

WATCH:

Pissed-off Black people in California are threatening Newsom, warning that if he doesn’t sign the Reparations bills, it will have a “direct impact” on his “friend, Kamala Harris, who is running for president.”

Someone needs to tell them that they are being replaced with illegals… pic.twitter.com/JFzl8WEKes

— I Meme Therefore I Am (@ImMeme0) September 1, 2024

The post Furious Black Californians Warn Newsom: Sign Reparations Bills or Face Consequences for Kamala Harris’s Presidential Run appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

After years trashing the Royal Family, Prince Harry is reportedly working on at least a partial comeback.

According to a report from The Daily Mail, Harry has become dissatisfied with life as an American Hollywood liberal and is consulting experts on how he can rehabilitate his image in Britain and the wider world.

The Mail reported:

Prince Harry has sought advice from trusted former aides in Britain on how to mastermind a return from exile in the United States, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Sources said the Duke of Sussex is consulting people ‘from his old life’ as a working royal after allegedly growing dissatisfied with advice from American-based image experts.

The overtures signify the first stage in a strategy to ‘rehabilitate’ Harry that would involve him spending more time in the UK to repair his relationship with his father and potentially initiate a partial return to the royal fold.

…

Sources stressed that Harry and Meghan, who have spent the past four years living in self-imposed exile in California with their two children, are not seeking a permanent return.

This newspaper can also reveal that the couple have parted company with yet another American PR adviser. Christine Weil Schirmer joined the Sussexes in 2020 as head of communications but left quietly late last year.

Since marrying Meghan Markle in 2018, Harry has given up his duties as a working royal and has sought to build a life in California dedicated to left-wing advocacy and making huge sums of money.

Among Harry’s various projects have included a Netflix documentary series where he and Meghan dished the dirt about their supposed mistreatment by the Royal Family and a memoir in which he trashed his family members and complained about the struggles he faced growing up in the limelight.

While details of Harry’s plans for a return to the royal fold have not been revealed, it remains unclear whether his family members would forgive him for his betrayal and allow his return.

The state of Harry’s fractured relationship with his brother, Prince William, was once again underlined this week following reports that the two men had “kept their distance” from one another while attending a funeral service for Lord Robert Fellowes, the brother-in-law of their late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.

Cold Reunion: Prince Harry and Prince William ‘Kept Their Distance’ During Funeral as Royal Rift Continues

“William and Harry were both there, but we never saw them speak to each other, and they were keeping their distance,” one resident told The Sun newspaper.

If Harry is truly serious about a return to a life of service, then he has a lot of apologies to make and relationships to mend.

The post REPORT: Miserable Prince Harry Wants His Old Life Back and is Planning a Royal Return – After Crapping All Over His Family appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Credit: Trump Campaign

In a powerful and emotionally charged video, several Gold Star families who have long stood by President Trump have come forward to deliver a scathing critique of Kamala Harris.

This video, which has rapidly gained traction on social media, lays bare the deep frustrations these families harbor toward Harris, accusing her of blatant disregard for military families and their sacrifices since she took office.

The video was released just days after President Trump honored the 13 U.S. service members who tragically lost their lives three years ago during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

These brave men and women were killed in a suicide bombing outside Kabul Airport, an event that still haunts the nation.

Standing alongside the grieving families and fellow service members, Trump paid tribute to the fallen heroes in a solemn ceremony that was a stark contrast to the actions—or inactions—of the current administration.

However, instead of joining the nation in mourning, the mainstream media focused its energy on criticizing President Trump for taking photos at Arlington National Cemetery. Ignoring the sacrifices of these heroes, the media chose instead to sensationalize the event, accusing Trump of using sacred ground for a political stunt.

The U.S. Army, too, condemned Trump for the ‘photo op,’ while curiously avoiding any criticism of President Biden, whose decisions during the Afghanistan withdrawal directly led to the tragic deaths of these 13 service members.

In an official statement, the U.S. Army said, “Arlington National Cemetery routinely hosts public wreath-laying ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for individuals and groups who submit requests in advance. Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations, and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.”

The statement went on to detail how an ANC employee who attempted to enforce these rules was allegedly “abruptly pushed aside,” but chose not to press charges. The Army then declared the matter closed, conveniently overlooking the broader issues at play.

President Trump’s campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, “We were granted access to have a photographer there.”

The families of the fallen heroes also defended Trump, stating, “We had given our approval for President Trump’s official videographer and photographer to attend the event, ensuring these sacred moments of remembrance were respectfully captured so that we can cherish these memories forever. We are deeply grateful to the President for taking the time to honor our children and for standing alongside us in our grief, offering his unwavering support during such a difficult time. His compassion and respect meant more than words can express.”

pic.twitter.com/jlCSAV5png

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 28, 2024

In the newly released video, they directly confront Kamala Harris, criticizing her for her lack of empathy and understanding of what military families endure.

Their outrage was further fueled by a post Harris made on social media, in which she accused Trump of “disrespecting sacred ground” and engaging in a “political stunt.” Harris went on to rehash unproven claims that Trump had previously disparaged fallen service members, calling them “suckers” and “losers,” and questioned his capacity to comprehend anything beyond “service to himself.”

As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation.

It is not a place for politics.

And…

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 31, 2024

In response to Harris’s post, one Gold Star mother said in the video, “Why won’t you return a call and explain to us how you call my daughter in laws death a success?”

Another father, whose son was among the 13 service members killed in Kabul, blasts Kamala Harris for her “heinous, vile, and disgusting” post, accusing her of trying to imply that Trump’s presence at Arlington Cemetery was a “political stunt.”

Watch the videos below:

Message to Kamala from Herman Lopez, Gold Star Father of Corporal Hunter Lopez:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Herman Lopez, Gold Star Father of Corporal Hunter Lopez: pic.twitter.com/hq9GSor6QH

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

Message to Kamala from Christy Shamblin, Gold Star Mother-In-Law of Sergeant Nicole Gee:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Christy Shamblin, Gold Star Mother-In-Law of Sergeant Nicole Gee: pic.twitter.com/poRZ3Q2G3J

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

Message to Kamala from Jim McCollum, Gold Star Father of Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Jim McCollum, Gold Star Father of Lance Corporal Rylee McCollum pic.twitter.com/UnOXrpmztu

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

Message to Kamala from Darin Hoover, Gold Star Father of Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Darin Hoover, Gold Star Father of Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover pic.twitter.com/kaGJHdbpi7

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

Message to Kamala from Mark Schmitz, Gold Star Father of Lance Corporal Jared M. Schmitz:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Mark Schmitz, Gold Star Father of Lance Corporal Jared M. Schmitz pic.twitter.com/EyKBNTmmP8

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

Message to Kamala from Jaclyn Schmitz, Gold Star Mother of Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Jaclyn Schmitz, Gold Star Mother of Lance Corporal Jared Schmitz pic.twitter.com/UvTI1s0Vza

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

Message to Kamala from Coral Doolittle, Gold Star Mother of Corporal Humberto A. Sanchez:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Coral Doolittle, Gold Star Mother of Corporal Humberto A. Sanchez pic.twitter.com/3QAiGmYXbs

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

Message to Kamala from Steve Nikoui, Gold Star Father of Lance Corporal Kareem M. Nikoui:

WATCH: Message to Kamala from Steve Nikoui, Gold Star Father of Lance Corporal Kareem M. Nikoui pic.twitter.com/Qm0M8VVMxG

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 31, 2024

The post POWERFUL: Gold Star Families Who Stood with President Trump Release Video Blasting Kamala Harris Unhinged Rhetoric appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

President Trump made an appearance at the “Moms for Liberty” National Summit in Washington DC on Friday night. Trump sat for an interview with Tiffany Justice to discuss topics including parents being targeted at school board meetings. Trump spoke with Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, for several minutes.

Under the Biden/Harris Regime, parents who spoke up at school board meetings were labeled domestic terrorists by the Federal Government and Merrick Garland’s DOJ.

“The parents truly love the kids, OK? Some of these people on the boards, I don’t think like the kids very much,” Trump said.

“This administration, it’s like the FBI goes after the people like it’s some kind of an insurrection,” Trump continued.

“They called us domestic terrorists, President Trump, for speaking out at school board meetings,” Tiffany Justice said.

“Well, we’ll change that on the first day, I promise you,” Trump said.

“You are not a domestic terrorist or a terrorist,” Trump continued.

Watch:

Mom for Liberty: “They called us domestic terrorists, President Trump, for speaking out at school board meetings.”

President Trump: “Well, we’ll change that on the first day. You are not a domestic terrorist. We do have terrorists coming in… but you’re not one.” pic.twitter.com/FO5q0k6BO0

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 31, 2024

President Trump also had some common-sense comments regarding the border crisis. He emphasized the simplicity of closing the border without the need for any bills.

“You can close the border. You don’t need a bill, you know they keep saying well just give us a bill. They had the worst bill I’ve ever seen. It was a disaster and they wouldn’t have signed it anyway because they do want open borders,” Trump said.

“I absolutely agree with you,” Tiffany Justice said.

Watch:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: You can close the border. You don’t need a bill. They had the worst bill I’ve ever seen. They want open borders. pic.twitter.com/lggEyJW0b1

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 31, 2024

President Trump also helped lighten the mood with a little bit of humor talking about TDS or “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.

“TDS is a horrible, horrible terminal disease. It destroys the mind. It destroys the mind before the body, but the body eventually goes. TDS is ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’” Trump said.

Watch:

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME — IT’S TERMINAL!

pic.twitter.com/Oh8IN0NlZ5

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 31, 2024

The post Moms for Liberty Co-Founder to President Trump: “They Called Us Domestic Terrorists – for Speaking Out at School Board Meetings” (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Credit: San Francisco 49ers

Ricky Pearsall, who currently plays as a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers in the National Football League (NFL), is the latest victim of San Francisco’s rampant violent crime.

He was shot during a robbery in San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood on Saturday.

The 23-year-old rookie first-round pick, fresh off an impressive college run at Arizona State and Florida, was reportedly targeted for his Rolex watch.

KTVU-FOX 2 journalist reported, “Ricky Pearsall was reportedly shot in a robbery attempt over his Rolex watch in downtown San Francisco according to sources. We don’t know his condition.”

Right now San Francisco Police are working an incident in Union Square where 2 people were reportedly shot. It has not been confirmed this is the Pearsall incident.

— Sal Castaneda (@sal_castaneda) August 31, 2024

Pearsall, who just returned to practice last Monday after missing the majority of training camp with a shoulder injury, was rushed to the hospital, where he remains in stable condition.

The suspect is in custody, according to a statement from Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s office per NBC News.

BREAKING: 49ers Ricky Pearsall has been shot in Union Square in an attempted robbery. According to Sup. Peskin’s office, the suspect is in custody and Ricky is in stable condition. His office has been in touch with Central Command. More to come. @nbcbayarea

— Gia Vang (@Gia_Vang) August 31, 2024

San Francisco Mayor London Breed released the following statement:

This afternoon, there was an attempted robbery in Union Square involving San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall and he was shot.

SFPD was on scene immediately and an arrest of the shooter was made.

My thoughts are with Ricky and his family at this time.

We will provide more updates, including on his condition, as I receive them.

This afternoon, there was an attempted robbery in Union Square involving San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall and he was shot.

SFPD was on scene immediately and an arrest of the shooter was made.

My thoughts are with Ricky and his family at this time.

We will…

— London Breed (@LondonBreed) September 1, 2024

The post 49ers Star Rookie Ricky Pearsall Shot During a Robbery Incident in Crime-Ridden San Francisco appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Guest Post by Miriam Judith

Deception, slander, manipulation, and propaganda are fundamental tactics employed by the left in their efforts to undermine Trump and republicans in their election efforts. These strategies have infiltrated every institution and industry, from academia to the media, shaping a narrative in order to hijack public opinion.

Hollywood is one of these industries that has increasingly become a powerful propaganda tool for leftist ideologies. And in a recent move to sway the public perception, a film that depicts Donald Trump in an extremely unflattering light is planned to be released just a few weeks before the election.

The propaganda film is called “The Apprentice”, named after the long running TV show that Trump famously hosted for fifteen seasons, stars Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.

The film, which will be released on Oct. 11 by Briarcliff Entertainment, only recently found a distributor after it struggled to garner any interest following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, largely due to fears of legal repercussions from the Trump team.

The movie apparently showcases the rise of Trump into power, and consists of inaccurate claims such as one depiction that Trump raped his ex-wife Ivana, played by Maria Bakalova. The allegations originally emerged after their divorce deposition in 1990, in which Ivana discredited the claims herself stating that her words were not meant to be taken literally or criminally, but that she had only felt violated.

The communications director for the Trump Campaign, Steven Cheung, referred to the film as a Hollywood propaganda piece littered with “malicious defamation” and false ”assertions” that he insisted would be met with a lawsuit to address these claims.

“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Cheung said.

This film is clearly not for entertainment or even informative purposes; instead, it’s a calculated move designed to influence public opinion and further distort the reality surrounding Trump’s presidency.

It should be well-known by now that the Hollywood elites create stories that seem to solely align with progressive ideologies, often portraying conservative viewpoints in a negative light. They do this via films, television shows, celebrity endorsements, etc.

In doing so, Hollywood is able to operate as more than just an entertainment industry; it instead has become a vehicle for ideological warfare, aiming to mold public opinion and drive political discourse in a direction that benefits only one side of political engagement.

The post Hollywood Propaganda: Anti-Trump Hit Piece Film ‘The Apprentice’ Finds Distributor and is Set to be Released Just Weeks Before the Election appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Individuals in Michigan drop several ballots in an unguarded Detroit drop box in 2020 (via MC4EI and Gateway Pundit)

A conservative group has announced plans to deploy trained observers armed with cameras around various ballot drop boxes across Arizona.

This initiative, aimed at catching any potential fraud, has sent shockwaves through the Democrat establishment in the state, who are now scrambling to block it.

Matt Schlapp, the influential chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), outlined the group’s intentions in a letter to Arizona state officials, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes.

The letter reads:

The purpose of this letter is not to relitigate the 2020 elections. Rather, we hope to work with you to reduce voter concerns regarding election fraud and the fair and transparent administration of elections.

The goal is to establish standards for drop box observation that our organization, as well as any other interested parties on the right or left, can rely upon and reassure the public in Arizona that drop boxes are not being fraudulently used.

Failure to do so risks that the results of the November elections will be questioned by those who did not support the winning candidate.

[…]

To address and help mitigate that skepticism, it is our intention to place monitors near a selection of drop boxes in select counties across Arizona. The purpose of doing so is to encourage—not discourage-voting. We are also considering using open-source information to identify those who are not eligible to vote.

We believe casting a legal ballot should be easy, and together we can begin to re-instill public confidence in our elections. To that end, we would like to work with your respective offices to establish appropriate standards for drop box monitoring that groups across the political spectrum can rely. Examples might include the following:

Drop box observers must be situated on public property.
Drop box observers must come no closer to the drop box than 75 feet, what is permitted for canvassers outside of polling locations. ARIz. REv. STAT. § 16-1018(1) (2022)
Drop box observers must not communicate in any way with voters.
Drop box observers must not be armed, carry any defensive gear, or wear any clothing that could be confused as representing law enforcement, military personnel, a candidate, or political party.
Drop box observers may have photographic or video equipment to document any activity that could be viewed as legally questionable.
Dropbox observers shall be trained on all laws and regulations governing activity that constitutes election observation and will follow those laws and regulations.

Kris Mayes, who “won” the 2022 election by 280 votes from Trump-endorsed Abe Hamadeh, wasted no time in condemning the plan, labeling it as voter intimidation.

“I want to be extremely clear that I will not stand for any voter intimidation, and that includes using ‘open-source’ information to identify individuals using a drop box to vote,” Mayes said per AZ Central.

Via Behizy:

BREAKING: A conservative group is planning to place trained observers with cameras around various ballot drop boxes in Arizona for the 2024 election to catch any fraud that occurs

Democrat state officials are currently PANICKING about the plan’s implementation

In a letter to… pic.twitter.com/C8ldeTMgt7

— George (@BehizyTweets) August 31, 2024

The post CPAC Plans to Deploy Camera-Wielding Observers at Arizona Ballot Drop Boxes, Sending Democrats into a Panic appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.