KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: GOP Should Send Kamala Harris a ‘Thank You’ Card for Picking Walz. “Tim Walz is a target rich candidate for mockery. The more that undecided voters learn about him, the less there is to like. The coastal Democrats don’t care about stolen valor — Dick Blumenthal is the senior senator from Connecticut, after all.”

SEAN TRENDE: Kamala Harris’ Puzzling VP Pick.

If Minnesota – a state the GOP has not won in a presidential election since 1972 – is in play, the election is over. Might he have crossover appeal in Wisconsin? Maybe some, but the track record of vice-presidential picks trying to deliver states beyond where they reside is not terribly impressive. Frankly, Walz’s gubernatorial campaigns in Minnesota weren’t particularly strong either, and by 2022 his support had mostly dried up outside of urban areas (which in Minnesota is enough to win).

Walz doesn’t really help shore up a narrative about Harris – if anything, his own progressive bona fides (about which more later) – complicates what is probably the narrative Harris most needs to combat this cycle. Put differently, my most progressive friends are ecstatic about him, but if your nominee is pretty liberal, and you’re pretty liberal, and you find yourself excited about the vice-presidential pick as well, you should probably be concerned (and yes, I think the complementary view is also true for conservatives). Finally, if there is one problem Harris does not have, it is a restive base; the progressive wing of the party is still in full “swoon” mode.

What makes the choice more puzzling – the same is true of Vance – is that there were other candidates who probably check off any box Walz checks off, but who might contribute to the ticket in other ways.

Waltz serves as a signal — likely delivered by Barack Obama and/or Nancy Pelosi via Kamala Harris — that the far-left wing is in full control of the party now and that resistance is futile.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): MSNBC Data Guru Has Bad News for Democrats About Walz.

One explanation, of course, is that Dems don’t expect Kamala to win and that the better candidates said no. But don’t get cocky.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Now Do You Believe Me That the Commies Are Coming? “Why in the name of the sweet Baby Jesus would the Democratic National Committee (DNC) think the nation would elect such a Marxist damp squib, and why would she select the biggest Maoist in the nation as her running mate?”

A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SOUNDING THE ALARM ON CALIFORNIA FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS: Finance guru who’s beaten Wall Street for 25 years makes doomsday prediction about future of California.

HIS APPEAL TO BLUE-COLLAR VOTERS IS BECOMING MORE SELECTIVE: MSNBC Data Guru Has Bad News for Democrats About Walz.

PURPLE HEART DAY: Honoring Our Heroes.

THAT HARDLY SEEMS SPORTING: Champagne found on 19th-century shipwreck off Sweden is declared off limits.

IRAN: From Hot War to Cold Feet? “Iran’s mullahcracy might be made up of crazies, but they aren’t suicidal.”

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: While His Unit Deployed to Iraq, a Chicken Hawk Walz-ed Away to Safety.

COMMUNITY NOTES REMAINS UNDEFEATED: Community Note on X Exposes The Guardian’s Hypocrisy Regarding ‘Two-Tier Policing’ in the UK.

HMM: Egypt asks its airlines to avoid Tehran airspace for three hours on Thursday.

WOEING: How About a Nice Game of Orbital Death Jenga?

CHRISTIAN TOTO: The Kamala Harris Sketch You’d Never See Today. “The next four months will find few mainstream humorists targeting Harris in any way, shape or form. They’ll turn all of their attention on President Donald Trump and figure out ways to prevent a second Trump presidency.”

KRUISER: ‘Slay Queen!’ Kamala Is the Worst Bit of Fanfic I’ve Ever Seen. “The Dems may not be discussing that in public but, deep down inside, they’re all thinking about it. The only thing that has changed about Kamala Harris since her ignominious exit from the 2020 presidential race is Joe Biden’s mental decline. It became obvious to them a couple of weeks ago that Harris would be the less awful option for 2024; sort of like choosing between ringworm and allergy hives.”

OUCH: Dell announces layoffs, pivot to AI innovation as tech industry continues to scramble. “Doubts over AI’s return on investment numbers have bubbled on Wall Street, but many companies — like Meta, Tesla and now Dell — believe it is the future and want to be positioned for profitability when, or if, that bet pans out.”

World War III Update: The Saudis Put Iran on Notice.

DANCE WITH THE ONE THAT BRUNG YA: Waltzes With Wokeness.

Using old-fashioned “first to 270 wins” reasoning, picking Walz over Shapiro doesn’t make much sense. Nailing down Pennsylvania (which the Shapiro pick wouldn’t guarantee, but which would at least give the Democrats a better chance at) would be a big help in getting to 270. Democrats also need Minnesota to win, but if they actually need Walz to secure blue-leaning Minnesota, the last midwestern “blue wall” state still standing in 2016, then the ticket has already lost.

No, the Walz pick indicates that the powers behind the throne in the Democratic Party are all-in on wokeness and social justice, even if it means losing the 2024 election to Trump. Because Walz has relentlessly pursued a woke agenda as governor.

Win or lose this or that election, the Left seems determined to rub your face in wokeness until you finally give up.

CLAY TRAVIS: Kamala Harris ‘Kneecapped Her Campaign’ by Picking Tim Walz.

JD VANCE IS WEIRD:

Kamala Harris’ new VP pick, Tim Walz not only supports CHILDREN at Adult LGBTQ Pride Rallies

He has children march at them with letters on their shirts spelling out his name pic.twitter.com/s0fwJPz8Wh

— Drew Hernandez (@DrewHLive) August 6, 2024

Grooming, straight up.

HMM: Josh Shapiro Backed Out of the Kamala Veepstakes at the Last Minute.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches first satellites for Thousand Sails megaconstellation. “The Thousand Sails constellation aims to provide global internet access. It is one of two planned Chinese systems to challenge U.S. projects including Starlink. Thousand Sails is also intended to secure finite orbital slots and frequencies, and provide national internet coverage and data security.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Two Commies Walk Into a Presidential Ticket… “Heading into last weekend the heavy money was on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro getting the nod from the DNC to be Harris’s running mate. I was always skeptical of that, given the current state of the Democratic Party. It seemed a bit of a stretch that the virulently anti-Semitic Democrats of 2024 would pick a Jewish man to be on the ticket. Seriously, Shapiro is lucky that the Dems didn’t call in some of the Squad’s brownshirts to give him a wrist tattoo and striped pajamas.”

NOT EVERY MOVEMENT ON THE LEFT IS ASTROTURF BUT THAT’S THE WAY TO BET:

109k likes on a video of a white guy saying that he's gonna vote for Kamala – and it turns out that's he a lifelong Democrat. pic.twitter.com/ZmYqlVcHRV

— Leftism (@LeftismForU) August 5, 2024

Who is this easily exposed performance art meant for, anyway?

KEVIN DOWNEY JR REPORTS ON HIS HOMESTATE: Battleground Michigan: Why the Great Lake State Can’t Afford a Kamala Win. “Arabs and Muslims make up roughly 2% of Michigan’s population. How they vote in November depends entirely on whether Kamala Harris will stand with Israel or join the Jew-haters club.”

That’s a done deal, isn’t it?

FAIL, BRITANNIA: The Disunited Kingdom.

Historically, democratically-elected governments have been able to weather unpopularity in a way that dictatorships can’t. But mass migration to Britain has not occurred democratically. For nearly thirty years, the electorate has consistently voted for parties pledged to reduce immigration, and just as consistently, immigration has continued to increase: in 2022-2023 immigration surpassed the one million mark.

Britain is now in the midst of a demographic-cultural transformation unknown at least since the Early Medieval period. Meanwhile, the British economy has stagnated (Britain’s GDP per capita is now lower than it was in 2008), Britain has the highest tax burden on record, public services are dysfunctional, crime is rising, and societal breakdown is accelerating.

How does this look to an average white working-class voter in Southport? You’ve watched helplessly from the sidelines as your country transformed from a functioning First World democracy into a semi-failed post-colonial state. You can’t help but notice that this decline overlaps precisely with the arrival of millions of men and women from strange alien cultures, not least because the town where you were born and grew up looks less familiar every day. You see these same newcomers encouraged by liberal elites to lean in to their ethnic and religious identities and grievances and leverage them for maximum tribal gain. Meanwhile, you, a member of the white residuum, are told with no sense of contradiction that any assertion of specifically ethnic interests on your part is beyond the pale of civilized discourse and just a few goosesteps from Hitler.

Increasingly alienated from the government media, you begin to obtain your news from online sites, which feature troubling stories and footage which the traditional media outlets choose to ignore. You see white-on-black crime provoke moral panic and solemn national debate, yet black-on-white crime, like acts of Islamist terrorism, is rationalized away as the aberrant psychopathology of disturbed individuals. You vote against all this, repeatedly. Yet your vote is ignored by both great parties of state, Labour and Conservative. Finally, when with all other forms of redress exhausted, you take to the streets and scream your grievances in the ‘language of the unheard’, no attempt is made to engage with your community or otherwise understand your sorrows, in conspicuous contrast to the response of the state to the BLM protests a few years ago.

Plus: “Multiculturalism in this sense may be said to have finally worked in spite of itself: Whites are becoming as race-conscious as everyone else, even though this consciousness, we are instructed to understand, is illegitimate by default.”

A similar process brought us Donald Trump and a four-year respite from the American Left’s similar attempt at remaking America.

In three months, we have one more chance at turning things back around. For Britain it might already be too late — they gave up their guns, and the ruling class is ruling accordingly.