In his 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, CBS’s Bill Whitaker broke new ground and actually did journalism, says the Spectator‘s Freddy Gray, asking challenging questions about key issues. And her performance was “Prince Andrew-like in its awfulness”. Here’s an excerpt.
Somebody give Bill Whitaker a prize. In his 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, which aired last night, the CBS correspondent did what no other journalist has successfully done since the Vice President was thrust to the top of the Democratic ticket: journalism. He asked Harris challenging questions about the matters voters care about most. He was civil, unaggressive, but professional enough to push her for clear answers. And Harris just couldn’t cope. Her performance was Prince Andrew-like in its awfulness.
On immigration, for instance, Whitaker asked Harris why the Biden-Harris administration had only recently started tackling the issue, after almost four years and an unprecedented surge in illegal border crossings. Harris robotically blamed Congress and Donald Trump, “who wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem so he told his buddies in Congress ‘kill the bill, don’t let it move forward’.”
Whitaker was not deterred. “But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,” he continued. “As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen immigration policies as much you do did?”
That caused the Harris-bot to malfunction. “It’s a long standing problem,” she warbled. “And solutions are at hand and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions…”
So Whitaker interrupted: “What I was asking was, was it a mistake to allow that kind of flood to happen in the first place?”
“I think the policies that we have been promoting have been about fixing a problem not promoting a problem,” she added.
“But the numbers did quadruple under your watch?” tried Whitaker, again.
Harris, ruffled, returned to square one: “And the numbers today… because of what we have done, we have cut the flow of illegal immigration, we have cut the flow of fentanyl, but we need Congress to act.”
Oh dear. That’s Harris’s overwhelming weakness as a political candidate. She can talk in soundbites and managerial slogans about “solutions not problems” but on issues of substance she can’t actually offer any solutions, which is a problem.
Worth reading in full.
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Trouble is, Joe and Jill (and Akhmed and Akmedia) public only hear the noise generated by the (dwindling audience) Marxist Stream Media. So they see and listen to the bullshine and misinformation generated by journalists who think they’re so very clever and ‘scientific’ by spouting climate change panic porn.
Climate change is natural and mankind has had very little impact. Nature is hugely powerful and causes almost all of the change we encounter. How do we wake up the average (intelligence) public.
And it is now understood that carbon follows temperature change, rather than causes it.
So “Settled Science” then? ——–Most politicians will never read these “scientific” reports. If they read anything from the IPCC at all it will be the “Summary for Policymakers”, which is put together by bureaucrats, often contradicting what the actual science reports have actually said, and full of language like “very likely”, “high confidence” etc, in other words what they want to be true so they can put their eco socialist policies of Sustainable Development in place and pretend the “science” supports it.
——Karl Marx well understood that controlling the means of production is POWER. Today this is being done by control of the trace gas CO2 which is a by product of Industrial Activity. Since all human activities involve the release of some CO2 then what better way to control all human activity than by control of the CO2.
——CO2 is the bureaucrats dream gas. It enables them to implement policies they long craved. They can ban drilling for oil and gas, stop us using coal, ban petrol and diesel cars, get rid of gas central heating and force heat pumps on us and smart meters to ration all the energy since wind and sun will never provide it all. The “better world” we are promised is a world of restricted energy use and as pointed out by a former head of the National Grid “We are going to have to get used to using electricity as and when it is available”.
——Doesn’t “Sustainable Development” sound like a nice reasonable idea? After all there is a “climate crisis” is there not? But in reality it has little to do with climate. Climate is simply the plausible excuse for the masses. It is actually about a complete reset away from Capitalism to a world run by Liberal Progressive (Marxist) technocrats controlling the worlds wealth and resources to bring about Social and Climate Justice. —-Communism.
——Earth Day is not on Lenin’s birthday by coincidence.
To steal all but one letter from a 1992 headline,— ‘It’s the Sun wot don it’. Apologies to the rag.
There’s no such thing as extreme weather, its just weather! All weather conditions are normal for the planet and should not be judged as extreme only based on mankind’s limited knowledge and time of existence on the earth
It’s up to us to adapt around the earth not the other way round!
…or one of the many other versions of this sentiment.
Does The Climate change due to people’s actions? Aside from the ridiculous concept of there being just one ‘climate’ (does nobody else remember school geography teaching us about tropical or temperate or arctic climates or coastal vs continental climate?), the evidence for Human caused climate change is on our telescreen weather forecasts most days: The temperature in London is usually forecast to be a degree or two warmer than the surrounding area. It’s called the Urban Heat Island effect and it’s built into the weather forecast models. The sheer size and materials that are London causes the UHI effect. London was built by and is occupied by people – this is what has caused the UHI and the effects on the local climate.
So should we abandon London and similar cities? Tempting as the idea is, it really wouldn’t be best for most of the residents.
Well said!
“Theres no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing!”
I believe that was the big yin, or any Scottish person for that matter
!
(Personally I would never choose to live in London let alone abonandon it, but, we don’t all have that choice I suppose)
That’s hit the nail right on the thumb!
We should never just “shrug off” propaganda. It is insidious and eats away at freedom.
The BBC costs us a fortune, as does the rest of the fantasy policy crowd, by misallicating resources which impoverishes us.
Climate is a derivation, using past, long term (thousands of years), meteorological data and averaging it.
GB has a temperate climate, not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry – usually only small changes. However as with all averages, 50% of the data is above, 50% below and some at both extremes.
As part of the average, extremes are to be expected from time to time, and even in clusters. It doesn’t mean the average is changing.
Yes, but now the MSM confuse, perhaps deliberately, “The Climate” with today’s weather, and avoid explaining what they are up to.
German news sources have meanwhile gotten around to claiming that the spring of this year was the hottest ever experienced by mandkind. This must have been the reason why it snowed in late spring for the first time ever in my conscious life which started somewhere in the second half to the 1970s. Snowfall is an absolutely typical sign of intense heat.
Steady increase of averages calculated from ‘adjusted’ temperature readings by people who need such steady increases to justify their political goals is something very much different from ‘global warming’.
“The Hottest ever experienced by mankind”??? ——They know that even though the thermometer was not invented till the 1700’s, and the temperature record that actually exists is a dog’s breakfast of manipulated and adjusted data that is a total embarrassment and calling this science would have Newton, Einstein, Faraday and Curie turning in their grave.
That’s what the headline said. The more smallprint part reduced the claim to hottest since 1940 – A truly geological time periods, few people know someone already alive by then! – and even this is total nonsense, ie, a statistic created by averaging carefully curated numbers and the calculated temperature difference will at most have been in the 0.1⁰ range. I didn’t really look at the details but we also had The Hottest Day Ever On Earth!!1® on a recent Sunday and this claim was based on an average 0.06⁰C¹ higher than the same day last year which was The Hottest Day Ever On Earth!!1® before, at least since beginning of July 2024 because nobody made such claims last year before Hottest Ever Everything!!2® marathon had started.
The story of climate change since Summer 2023 is the hottest spell of hot air professional climate politicians have ever let off.
¹ Insofar I remember this correctly, the absolute temperature was 17⁰C plus something fractional. This will not only melt steel, it’ll cause it to become gaseous in an instant. Absolutely unheard of!
The other news items that get on my goat are the forest fires – does everyone think these trees dotted around mountainsides evolved just for us to look at them – they actually expect fire at some point, and some even use this to kick off the growth of their new seeds… it’s a natural cycle, destructive in our eyes yes, but highly effective
The translations above are intended to tease, rather than mock, the IPCC report, though it is obviously inappropriate for something so significant to be presented in a way that so obscures its content. The main focus of the IPCC report is about something indisputable, that the world is indeed getting warmer. Undoubtedly, some of that warming is due to human influence. Any debate centres around the potential consequences of warming, the magnitude of the human effect and whether or not anything we do will change outcomes.
http://www.climatediscussionnexus.com often has interesting reports and analyses of IPCC publications. The major problem with the IPCC is simply that any government funded research is expected or required to support the idea of anthropogenic global warming, otherwise the research will not be funded.
So it can be fun to ‘tease’ IPCC products but why does the author then claim that it is “indisputable, that the world is indeed getting warmer” and that “Undoubtedly, some of that warming is due to human influence”.
It has often been reported that many scientists are not sure whether anthropogenic effects are in any way significant. It was also not that long ago that we were supposedly heading for another ice age.
The last sentence is also (dutifully?) the scary one: “Any debate centres around the potential consequences of warming, the magnitude of the human effect and whether or not anything we do will change outcomes”.
Instead of flogging the same old horse that we are all to blame when the earth burns and the oceans boil, it would have been nice to add some perspective, e.g.
– we are recovering from the Little Ice Age around 1600 AD, so temperatures are generally increasing;
– but temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period around 800 AD were higher (long before people started driving cars and flying aeroplanes);
– and temperatures have been going up and down by amounts of around 10°C for millions of years, long before humans appeared on this planet.
We really need to fight against all this climate nonsense.
I see the point you make about my last sentence. It reflects my own instinct to deal with one thing at a time, in this case ‘extreme weather’ and put the other issues away for another day. For the record, my feeling is that it is possible that the human influence on warming is significant (low confidence) but there is nothing that we can do about it (high confidence).
I am as sceptical as the rest of the readership of this fine organ, but would like to ask @Mark Ellse to check something out. I followed the link on ‘histrionic BBC weather report’ at the foot of his article, to find a dumbed-down account along the usual lines, but this too had a link, to the IPCC Sixth Assessment ReportWorking Group 1: The Physical Science Basis where at random I clicked on the ‘Temperature Extremes’ button – and there it is stated:
“Human-induced greenhouse gas forcing is the main driver of the observed changes in hot and cold extremes on the global scale (virtually certain ) and on most continents (very likely )”
Being short of time I stopped there – but it does seem to support the BBC’s alarmist position, at least as far as temperature extremes are concerned. Are we perhaps guilty of cherry-picking?
Fair point. In fact I didn’t cherry pick. I looked IPCC commentary on the stream of reporting we get from the BBC, the like of which the final three words linked to viz: heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods. I went directly to the report and not to the physical science behind the report (the link that you provided).
If we are to take documents from the IPCC seriously, we should expect any report to give us what the scientists of the IPCC think important at the time of writing the report. As you correctly point out, they mention extreme temperatures in the physical science review but not in the report. For me that, and the many examples of the report saying things like ‘poorly understood’, lead me to think that we really must not be stampeded (as we were with covid) by people whose views are very largely pessimistic guesswork.