Know Your Enemy - Kamala's Commanding Debate Performance [TEASER]

Matt and Sam break down the first, and possibly only, presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Duration: 3m
Broadcast on: 11 Sep 2024
Audio Format: other

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy

Your intrepid hosts watched the first, and possibly only, presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump so you didn't have to—and then stayed up late to talk about it. After a somewhat wobbly start, Harris seized the momentum with a visceral, deeply affecting answer about the consequences of the GOP's assault on abortion rights, then baited Trump into a rambling rant about the size of his crowds. He never really recovered, and spent much of the rest of the debate running his mouth about the debunked story of Haitian immigrants stealing and eat pets in Ohio or claiming that Harris was responsible for every policy of the Biden administration. What did we learn about the candidates and their priorities? Did Harris break with Biden in any significant ways? What does the Trump-Vance obsession with immigrants reveal about their campaign? What firearm does Harris own? And what about foreign policy? Make sure you listen to the very end!

Sources:

Sam Roberts, "Noel Parmentel Jr., Essayist, Polemicist and Apostate, Dies at 98," New York Times, Sept 6, 2024

Watch the entire Harris-Trump debate (YouTube)

Nate Cohn, "New Poll Suggests Harris’s Support Has Stalled After a Euphoric August," New York Times, Sept 8, 2024

Huo Jingnan and Jasmine Garsd, "JD Vance Spreads Debunked Claims about Haitian Immigrants Eating Pets," NPR, Sept 10, 2024

Mike Catalini, et al, "Trump Falsely Accuses Immigrants in Ohio of Abducting and Eating Pets," Associated Press, Sept 11, 2024

B.D. McClay, "The Taylor Swift Endorsement Fantasy," New York Times, Sept. 8, 2024

"Taylor Swift Derangement Syndrome," Know Your Enemy, Mar 26, 2024

There's something so disturbing to me, Sam, about, frankly, the way J.D. Vance has piped line "this" issue of Haitians eating pets. This was like him. He was the one tweeting about it. It's in Ohio, right? So you can say, "I've heard from constituents." I mean, you're just setting up these people to be attacked. I mean, the word gets thrown around a lot, but it's blood libel. Yes. It's not about eating children. It's about eating pets, but I mean, it's profoundly disturbing. As the debate went on, I really think you saw this is the beating heart of the Trump campaign, anti-immigrant, anti-migrant sentiment. And they get blamed for every single fucking thing, essentially. Like you look at any issue, housing problems, housing shortages, blame the immigrants, jobs blame the immigrants, crime blame the immigrants. All the spokes of the wheel go back to this vision of like racial and ethnic purity, mass deportation, and unleashing hate toward immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers, people trying to come to our country. Whatever their legal status, they don't fucking care. Do you think Trump could tell you the difference between someone applying for asylum and two or three other categories? Of course not. It's not just like the thing they talk about the most, it's conceptually at the heart of everything. And I mean, I know no one should be surprised by the depths of depravity to which one Ted Cruz will sink to, but when he tweeted one of these memes about like cats saying vote for Trump so that the Haitian immigrants don't eat me, which is literally what the meme said. I really did have one of those like seeing a deeply disturbing premonition of the future. It's like the combination of seeing kitsi memes deployed in the service of such ranked dehumanization of other people, a friend of mine on Twitter said it was like looking at health through people. Yeah, that's a good one. That has been rattling around in my brain for a couple of days. Well, it's also like looking through health through the kind of accumulated detritus and junk of the internet age. This meme feels like this collision point of like boomer racism, Gen X internet culture, and then like millennial and zoomer based online transgression or whatever. The worst combination of the history of the internet. Yeah, but I also just think like these people who like share these memes being like, yeah, this is the cutting edge shit you're just not allowed to say, but it's like the truth about everything. It's like people used to say all the time, like Asian immigrants eat dogs, like that was like a joke in like every like dumbass fucking movie, it's like, this is just like old man bullshit. This is not cool cutting edge based race realism or whatever. Not that that would be better, but this is just lame as shit. It's lame as shit. It's just like the stuff that like racist boomer uncles would say at Thanksgiving and everybody, no matter what their politics were, would be like, shut up, like shut up.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam break down the first, and possibly only, presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.