It sounds pretty good and sound real. Free speech is alive and well on today's news talk TNT. Indeed it is and this is Bezel Valentine sitting in for Patrick Henningson today, Wednesday the 7th of August. I trust TNT and one of the voices I trust the most is Brian, has some acclaim, host of State of the Nation. Thanks for jumping on today Brian. Hey Bezel, great to be here with you. Thanks for the invite. I'm happy to talk about any American politics that you might be interested in. There's a new person on the ticket and everybody's trying to figure out who this is and what it means. Yeah, Tim Waltz, Governor of Minnesota, Minnesota Nice apparently, but he's also being tarred with the brush of a far leftist, a Bernie Sanders effectively by the Fox News crowd. First of all, do you think VP picks make any difference? Minnesota has been in the blue column for decades, so slightly surprising perhaps that Harris has picked Tim Waltz seen as a radical if she wants to carry those crucial Midwest stays. Yeah, it's a rather bizarre decision on her part, not that the pool's pretty shallow for her unfortunately, but I was a little surprised by this and, you know, I don't know, the first thing that I thought was wow, this guy was terrible during COVID and then my second thought was wait a minute, didn't this guy, isn't he one of the ones that's been giving rights that are normally reserved for Americans, you know, like a driver's license and things like this, two illegal aliens, yep, check in the box, that's him. And then I started looking back at, you know, what he and his family members and his cabinet we're doing during the George Floyd riot days, the BLM days and boy, it is just very, very clear that the Democrat party is looking to have the most far left radicals they could possibly have, Kamala Harris has been notably known as, you know, left of even Bernie Sanders, the most leftist radical senator that we had at the time and, well, Waltz, not a whole lot different. Yeah, Waltz likes to portray himself as a sort of a funkeler figure, friendly, approachable, obviously just on the pure identity politics level, he's an older white guy that therefore might be seen to add some gravitas to the ticket, but he's got his own baggage as well, did he not sort of bizarrely join the army and then abandon his unit after training immediately before deployment to Iraq, it sounds like it might be another John Kerry Swift moment. Yeah, it very much does. And there again, that's a great example when they're vetting these, you know, VP candidates, are they not looking at that? Are they not looking at open military records and these kinds of things? I mean, it's really bizarre to see and it makes me think either one, they're pandering to a very small part of the American electorate or they're basically putting, planting their flag of, you know, what some would say is just straight up communism into the ticket for 2024, you know, it's almost like you had, you had no chance, if you're a Democrat, you had no chance to vote for either of these people in a primary, you know, I mean, last time Kamala Harris, last time I saw her on a debate stage, she was getting absolutely wrecked by Tulsi Gabbard, it just came out terrible looking for Kamala Harris. And you know, they're just basically telling the American voters and in particular American Democrat party voters and independents, this is the only choice that you can have and it's someone, you know, Kamala, I don't like the dialectic Basil of, you're either like, you know, the oppositional dialectic of you've got, you know, Republicans and GOP framed as or the at least the extreme side of the GOP framed as fascist and the extreme side of the DNC as communists. But this woman and this man, the Harris walls ticket are very communistic. If you look at the way that they've spoken over the years, they don't just talk about equality. They straight up talk about equity as Elon Musk boosted today on X big time. And Kamala Harris, there was a big mashup of her literally talking about how we talk about equality, but what we really want and need is equity, right? Equity of outcome, equality of outcome, no matter what for everybody. And we all know where that talking point comes from. Yes, absolutely. I mean, I would, I would have to disagree about whether or not either of them are communist. I don't think they want to nationalize every industry in the United States and set up workers' councils to run them. It's not going to be government by the working class. It's just this sort of rebranded wokery. I mean, there's that extraordinary clip of Kamala Harris from before she became vice president, which is resurfaced, you know, stay woke, be woke or wonk is mostly extraordinary little clip. And I think the Trump campaign could do worse than incorporate that in some of their commercials. Of course, Walt's is as, you know, 99.9% of elected officials in America, staunchly pro Israel, Mark Melman, chairman of democratic majority for Israel, said after his nomination, not only is governor waltz an accomplished and beloved leader in the state of Minnesota, having been elected six times to the House of Representatives and twice to the governorship. But he is also a proud pro-Israel Democrat with a strong record of supporting the US-Israel relationship. Nevertheless, republicans are trying to portray him as some kind of Hamas supporter, because he has made some mild comments that, you know, perhaps the total genocide of an entire population may not be the best sort of idea. And of course, you have to be fully on board for the total elimination of the Palestinian people to count as true Israel supporter in the United States these days, Hessian. Isn't that amazing? I think that's part of the bigger, you know, psychological operation that we're under right now. And I think it's completely laughable, you know, to say that the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, or, you know, just about anybody outside of, you know, the squad, is pro-Hamas. I mean, what are you talking about? I mean, we just saw Kamala Harris, not what, six, seven weeks ago or less, speaking in front of the APAC audience and saying, you know, we're going to give Israel everything they need. It's like, there's this fake talking point that they're trying to plant that the Democrats are patently, you know, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic. This thing has just been growing and growing, but then you look at the voting, you look at the way the money is spent, you look at the across the board in the Senate agreement on sending, you know, 500-pound bombs, 2,000-pound bombs, all that stuff by the palette, all the money they need. And they promise to do that pretty much, you know, add in for an item. So I think that one's really us, a politically motivated talking point that it's not great. It's really not great. Walz was this week described as an outspoken Ukraine supporter by the key of independence. So he's got that badge and a former military man, he's been thoroughly engaged in the conflict from the get-go apparently condemning Russia's and I quote unprovoked and unlawful attacks the day after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It wasn't a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but anyway, yeah, it seems like he's read the script on all the important talking points. Do you think he's going to actually be of any electoral benefits to Kamala Harris? I mean, you know, that's the whole reason for getting somebody like him on the ticket, isn't it? They carry certain states. Everybody thought he was going to be Josh Shapiro because of Pennsylvania and everybody's route to the White House runs through Pennsylvania. Yeah, isn't that interesting? And there again, the conservative incorporated talking point on Shapiro is that, well, they didn't pick him because they're anti-Semitic, like they're trying to get to see that anti-Semitic. Yeah, I've seen that one rolling around and it's just like, are you kidding me? I mean, and no, I don't think that walls is going to provide any sort of, you know, extra voting block or excitement. I mean, you know, I hate to ride on the hashtag of the week, but he is weird. All right. I mean, I looked at some of that, some of the presentation last night, the Harris Waltz event and I just don't see this guy being attractive to anybody. The never Trump crowd, you know, the never again, Trump crowd, but that's really turned into the anyone but Trump crowd. And that's a pretty sad state of affairs when it's just down to that. And this guy, you know, I also noticed this morning that investigative journalist Paul Sperry was posting on his ex and he's saying that walls traveled to China annually from 1996 until 2003, he was granted a special work visa by the Chinese government. You know, obviously raising questions about his loyalties and motivations. And he has expressed reportedly deep admiration for the Chinese government. Even did a honeymoon in China. So very interesting stuff and longstanding foster student exchanges between American youth and China. So really deep ties to China. I'm sure that's got a lot of people asking questions. Yeah, the Trump crowd are supposed to be delighted with the pit, not least because of his abandoning his unit, but Harris is for all that, as you rightly said, she was eviscerated on the debate stage four or five years ago by a Tulsi Gabbat, she's nosing ahead. You know, Donald Trump's age has started to be a question in people's minds. Diddy Harper voters saying he's now too old. So ironic after getting rid of the Sneed Al Biden from the ticket. But what's the mood on the ground in Texas there and why don't I mean, we always talk about the uni party, basically two wings of the same bird. But with Walt's on the ticket against Vance and Trump, certainly sort of culturally and on the issue of Ukraine and on some domestic and social issues in particular, there really are stark differences between these two cams. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've not met a single person in Texas yet who said to me, Hey, how about that? Tim Walls, aren't we excited about that, you know, there's a lot of people, we've had people flooding into the state for the last four years. I'm sure there's some support or perhaps it's just, is it going to be people leaning into that anyone? But Trump hashtag, you know, I really feel like that's sort of their only hope. They don't have any plan. They don't have any planks in the platform. It's, it's, you know, there's nothing about the, you know, the border. There's nothing about the economy that there's, there's just really not much there that they're campaigning on yet that I've seen yet. It's, it's supposed, it just feels like a very astroturfed sort of media driven excitement, algorithm driven excitement. They're paying people loads of money. They're paying influencers, tons of money, and that's not going well. They already had one influencer freak out on them and admitted, admitting, I don't know anything about politics. I just happen to have 30 million people on my YouTube and they wanted to pay me money to say that this is a good campaign after he got backlash for not doing it well. Yeah, it's an absolute joke. American politics, always an entertaining circus. And thank you for our guide today, Rasha. Thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Basil. Look forward to doing it again. We're going to take a break for the headlines now. And when we come back, I'll be joined by Professor Emeritus from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, one of the keenest minds on geopolitics in the world today. I'd go that far. Professor Anthony Hall joins me after the news headlines. Don't go away. We'll be right back.
