August 1, 2024

Thursday, August 1, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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From Venture Capitalist Pledges to Labor, Kamala keeps up the momentum.

Worrying about Elon Musk (Tesla and X) and Peter Thiel (PayPal and J.D. Vance patron) supporting Trump? This should ease your mind.

First, remember unstable Musk reneged his ongoing $45 million a month pledge to Trump, and Thiel stopped funding Vance midway through the weird guy’s Senate race. 🤞

Prominent tech investors and workers publicly back Kamala Harris. More than 100 venture capitalists, including Vinod Khosla and Reid Hoffman, pledged both political and financial support for the vice president against Donald Trump, and a letter by tech entrepreneurs and workers gathered more than 550 signatures in two days.

Click on the link 👇 if you want more drill down.

More than 100 techies sign VCs for Kamala pledge, backing VP Harris

In an online pledge on Wednesday, more than 100 tech investors and entrepreneurs said they are supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in her presidential bid.

The group calls itself VCs for Kamala.

“We spend our days looking for, investing in and supporting entrepreneurs who are building the future,” the group said in its pledge.

The group, calling itself VCs for Kamala, is made up of investors and entrepreneurs from a range of established and rising funds, and different demographic groups. It includes Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban, along with Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures, and Rebecca Kaden, a partner at Union Square Ventures.

“We spend our days looking for, investing in and supporting entrepreneurs who are building the future,” the group said in its pledge. “We are pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship and pro-technological progress. We also believe in democracy as the backbone of our nation. We believe that strong, trustworthy institutions are a feature, not a bug, and that our industry — and every other industry — would collapse without them.”

The VCs for Kamala list highlights a deepening political divide in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry.

Hoffman, a longtime Democratic donor and partner at venture firm Greylock, shared a link to the pro-Harris pledge on X, the social media site owned by Musk.

“Proud to sign the #vcsforkamala pledge,” Hoffman wrote. “It’s an investment in our democratic future.”

Erika Lucas, General Partner at VEST Her Ventures, wrote on LinkedIn that there were “a lot of women, particularly Black Women VCs,” behind the pledge, adding “I’m proud to serve and organize with them as well our male colleagues. We understand the assignment.”

The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to take place in Chicago starting Aug. 19.

(CNBC)

The Associated Press says this 👇 gives the Vice President “blue-collar firepower in industrial states.”

Did you watch Senator Warnock at Kamala’s rally on Tuesday in Atlanta?

Here’s your chance.👇

One more thing. Or two.

to smile at.👇

Kamala made it clear in Atlanta that she is ready to debate Donald Trump.

Morning Consult Pro. Bloomberg.July 30.

• Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly leads former President Donald Trump inside the surveys’ margins of error in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, while she appears more competitive in Michigan. Trump holds small leads in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while the two are tied in Georgia.
• Harris’ gains in Michigan come amid an increase in support among groups with whom Biden underperformed, such as young voters, Democrats, and the state’s independent voters. These improvements for the presumptive Democratic nominee come alongside similar gains among the larger swing-state electorate
• 46% of swing-state voters view Harris favorably, up 5 points from the previous survey wave, while the share holding unfavorable views fell from 53% to 50%. Notably, 30% of voters now hold “very favorable” opinions of Harris, up from 21% before Biden dropped his bid.
• Biden’s decision to clear the way for Harris’ ascent has put the Democratic Party on better footing against Trump, but the presumptive nominee’s advantages remain narrow with several weeks to go before voting begins.

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Read J.D. Vance’s Violent Foreword to Project 2025 Leader’s New Book.

Trump’s running mate writes that “it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”Donald Trump has been desperate lately to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s radical plan to remake the federal government under his presidency. “I have no idea who is behind it,” he said in early July about the plan, which would replace thousands of federal workers with partisan loyalists, ban abortion, and disband the Department of Education. A couple of weeks later, he said of the people behind Project 2025, “They are extreme, they’re seriously extreme, but I don’t know anything about it.”

Vance has deep ties to the Heritage Foundation, and in particular to Kevin Roberts, who has been president of the right-wing think tank since 2021 and is the architect of Project 2025. Vance has praised Roberts for helping to turn the organization “into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism” and has endorsed elements of Project 2025. Vance is also the author of the foreword to Roberts’s upcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light, which The New Republic has obtained in full even though the book’s publisher, HarperCollins’s Broadside Books, has apparently tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.

The subtitle and cover of Roberts’s book were softened as scrutiny of the Trump campaign’s ties to Project 2025 grew. The book, which is scheduled to be published on September 24, was originally announced with the subtitle “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and featured a match on the center of its cover. The subtitle is now “Taking Back Washington to Save America,” and the match is nowhere to be seen. Promotional language invoking conservatives on the “warpath” to “burn down … institutions” like the FBI, the Department of Justice, and universities has also been removed or toned down, though it is still present in some sales pages.

But the inspiration for that extreme language can be found in Vance’s foreword, which ends with a call for followers to “circle the wagons and load the muskets,” and describes Roberts’s ideas as an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay [sic] ahead.” (The New Republic downloaded Dawn’s Early Light earlier this month from NetGalley, which provides advance copies of books to reviewers and booksellers. Copies were removed from the platform earlier this month.)

Vance does not explicitly mention Project 2025 in his foreword. He does, however, make clear that he is extremely close with Roberts and that he sees him as a strong ally in a shared political project. The foreword opens with the parallels in their biographies: Both are from poor families and had difficult childhoods, both are Catholic, and both are now working in Washington, D.C., to remake the country. Over the three-page foreword, Vance singles out Roberts in the areas where the two most strongly align politically. First, he praises Roberts for his willingness to criticize corporations and break with the GOP’s free-market orthodoxy; then, for his strong emphasis on the family. “Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics,” Vance writes, by “recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.”

Vance’s foreword is also, notably, a call for revolution. “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems,” he writes. “We are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.” That is where the muskets come in:

As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

On Tuesday, the Trump campaign’s public attacks on Project 2025 bore fruit: The project is shuttering its policy operations, and its director, Paul Dans, is stepping down. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. But it’s not clear that Project 2025 itself is ending, as Roberts reportedly is taking over its operations. (The Heritage Foundation, the Trump campaign, and HarperCollins did not respond to multiple requests for comment before publication.)

Whether Vance’s foreword to Dawn’s Early Light survives this dustup is anyone’s guess. Here’s the text in full:

In the classic American film Pulp Fiction, John Travolta’s character, recently returned from Amsterdam, observes that Europe has the same consumer goods as America, but there it’s just a “little different.” That’s how I feel about Kevin Roberts’s life. He grew up in a poor family in a corner of the country largely ignored by America’s elites—but his corner was in Louisiana and mine in Ohio and Kentucky. Like me, he’s a Catholic, but unlike me, he was born into it. His grandparents played an outsized role in his life, just as mine did. And now he works far from where he grew up, just a few steps from my office, in Washington, DC: he is the president of one of Washington’s most influential think tanks, and I’m a US senator.

Now he has written the book you hold in your hands, which explores many of the themes I’ve focused on in my own work. Yet he does so profoundly, with a readable style that makes accessible its real intellectual rigor.

Never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism. The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Yet it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.

If you’ve read a lot of conservative books or think you have a good sense of the conservative movement, I suspect the pages that follow will be surprising—even jarring. Roberts understands economics and supports basic free market principles, but he doesn’t make an idol out of decades old theories. He argues persuasively that the modern financial corporation was almost entirely foreign to the founders of our nation. The closest eighteenth-century analogue to the modern Apple or Google is the British East India company, a monstrous hybrid of public and private power that would have made its subjects completely unable to access an American sense of liberty. The idea that our founders meant to make their citizens subjects to this kind of hybrid power is ahistorical and preposterous, yet too many modern “conservatives” make such an idol out of the market that they ignore this. A private company that can censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats deserves the scrutiny of the Right, not its support. Roberts not only gets this at an instinctive level; he can articulate a political vision to engage in that scrutiny effectively.

Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids. We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred—and to the extent possible, lifelong—union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families. But we should also do something else: create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged. That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. That means protecting American industries—even if it leads to higher consumer prices in the short term. That means listening to our young people who are telling us they can’t afford to buy a home or start a family, not just criticizing them for a lack of virtue. Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.

My childhood was not, by any objective measure, easy. Neither was that of Kevin Roberts. Both of us were negatively impacted by family instability, and both of us were saved by the resilience of the thick network of family—grandparents, aunts, uncles—that is often the first and most effective component of our social safety net. Both of us saw how a factory leaving a town could destroy the economic stability that provided the foundation for those families. And both of us learned to love the country that gave both of us and our families second chances, despite some bumps along the way. In these pages, Kevin is trying to figure out how we preserve as much of what worked in his own life, while correcting what didn’t. To do that, we need more than a politics that simply removes the bad policies of the past. We need to rebuild. We need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like.

Here’s an analogy I sometimes use to articulate what the previous generation of conservatives got right and wrong. Imagine a well-maintained garden in a patch of sunlight. It has some imperfections of course, and many weeds. The very thing that makes it attractive for the things we try to cultivate makes it attractive for the things we don’t. In an effort to eliminate the bad, a well-meaning gardener treats the garden with a chemical solution. This kills many of the weeds, but it also kills many of the good things. Undeterred, the gardener keeps adding the solution. Eventually, the soil is inhospitable.

In this analogy, modern liberalism is the gardener, the garden is our country, and the voices discouraging the gardener were conservatives. We were right, of course: in an effort to correct problems—some real, some imagined—we made a lot of mistakes as a country in the 1960s and 1970s.

But to bring the garden back to health, it is not enough to undo the mistakes of the past. The garden needs not just to stop adding a terrible solution, though it does need that. It needs to be recultivated. The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems—we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach. As Kevin Roberts writes, “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.

—J.D. Vance (The New Republic)

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Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday with ABC’s Rachel Scott.

An embarrassment. His team yanked him.

Watch or read transcript or both. 👇

Former President Trump clashed with ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, accusing her of asking a "nasty question" and referring to the Disney-owned network as "fake news" on Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago.

Trump participated in a Q&A with Scott, Semafor reporter Kadia Goba and Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner. The event caused ripples before it began, as many Black journalists objected to Trump even being invited in the first place. Once it began, Scott kicked things off by "addressing the elephant in the room."

"A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true. You have told four congresswoman of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like ‘animal’ and ‘rabbit’ to describe Black attorneys. You've attacked Black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they asked are, ‘stupid and racist,’" Scott said.

"You've had dinner with a White supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So, my question, sir, now that you were asking Black supporters to vote for you," she continued. "Why should black voters trust you after you have used language like that?"

Trump shot back, "I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, a first question. You don’t even say ‘hello, how are you.’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network. I think it’s disgraceful that I came here in good spirit. I love the Black population of this country; I’ve done so much for the Black population of this country."

Trump listed some of his accomplishments for the Black community before returning to his thoughts on the "very rude" introduction from Scott.

"I don’t know why you would do something like that… I was invited here, and I was told my opponent, whether it was Biden or Kamala, I was told my opponent was going to be here. It turned out, my opponent isn’t here. You invited me under false pretense," Trump said.

"And then you were half an hour late, just so you understand, I have too much respect for you to be late. They couldn’t get their equipment working or something," Trump continued as Scott interrupted.

"Mr. President, I would love if you could answer the question," Scott said, again asking why Black voters should trust him for another term.

"I think it’s a very nasty question," Trump shot back. "I have answered the question. I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln."
Trump was then asked if he was better than President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

"For you to start off a question-and-answer period, especially when you’re 35 minutes late because you couldn’t get your equipment to work, in such a hostile manner, I think it’s a disgrace. I really do," Trump said.

Scott then asked if it’s appropriate to label Harris a "DEI" candidate, which resulted in Trump and the ABC News reporter bickering over the definition of the term. Trump eventually said Scott was using a "hostile and very nasty tone" during the exchange.

Trump continued to criticize Scott later in the event.

"She was very rude," Trump said while pointing at Scott. "That wasn’t a question… she gave a statement."

Trump on Harris at the NABJ:

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black, so I don’t know. Is she Indian, or is she Black?”

Trump on Vance’s fitness for the Presidency.

Asked by Harris Faulkner if JD Vance is ready on day one, Trump answers: “Historically, the vice president, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact...Virtually never has it mattered.”

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Your Daily Reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.

Olympics update.

If you haven’t seen Simone Biles fly, look for her on YouTube.com and watch her in the individual TEAM USA women’s gymnastic final tonight.

For now, keep this in mind.

Today, Team USA women's basketball vs Belgium schedule.

Time: Noon MST, 3 p.m. ET

TV channel: USA Network

Streaming:Peacock, NBCOlympics.com

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27 year old American Swimmer Katie Ledecky won the 1500m yesterday, breaking the Olympic record by 5.33 seconds, for her 8th gold Medal. Ledecky has won 12 medals in an Olympic career which began in 2012. She is planning to swim in the 2028 Olympics.

Ledecky is now the tied with Swimmer Jenny Thompson for the most decorated woman Olympian, and she still has two more races to swim in France.

Touch to watch one of Katie’s young fans 👇. “She waved at me! She saw me! “The child had to sit down to stop from fainting. When you watch this, you will smile.