(Daily Signal)—Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris sat down with CNN’s Dana Bash Thursday for her first interview since launching her campaign. Harris answered over a dozen questions during the pre-recorded interview.
Harris’ running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz joined Harris for the interview, a move which many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, criticized.
Here’s a look at some of the statements Harris made during her interview.
1. ‘Diversity of Opinion’
The current vice president, a lifelong progressive Democrat, sought to appeal to moderate voters, even telling Bash she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet in the interest of “diversity of opinion.”
In an exclusive interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said she would be open to putting a Republican in her cabinet. The full interview will air at 9 p.m. ET Thursday on CNN's "The First Interview: Harris & Walz, A CNN Exclusive."… pic.twitter.com/9nRzSA7RYb
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 29, 2024
“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” Harris said.
Harris’ record, however, indicates her invitation for diverse options is limited.
While Harris was serving as California attorney general in 2016, California investigators searched pro-life activist David Daleiden’s home. Daleiden had recorded undercover video of Planned Parenthood.
“The fact that Ms. Harris is seizing private property of a pro-life California activist who has exposed horrific practices conducted by Planned Parenthood … is a conflict of interest and abuse of government power,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, said at the time.
Harris has also been accused of targeting conservative organizations because under her leadership as attorney general, California required organizations receiving donations to “file copies of their federal IRS Form 990 tax forms,” according to America First Legal.
“These forms include a list of all donors who contributed at least $5,000 to the charity in a given year,” the legal group explains. But, in 2021, the Supreme Court held in the case of Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta that mandatory disclosures were a violation of the First Amendment.
America First Legal says it believes that Harris may have “sought donor information about her political enemies without complying with federal law designed to protect donor privacy.”
2. Immigration and Southern Border
President Joe Biden tasked Harris in the third month of his presidency with “leading the administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” according to a White House fact sheet.
But as Bash pointed out during her interview with Harris, a historic number of illegal aliens have arrived on America’s southern border under the Biden-Harris administration.
“Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions?” Bash asked, referencing Biden’s executive order giving him authority to close the border when the seven-day average of daily border crossings between ports of entry exceeds 2,500.
Harris did not address Biden’s executive order but told Bash that “the number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we began that work,” referring to her work to address the root causes of immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Since March 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the Border Patrol has encountered over 1.9 million illegal aliens from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras along the southern border, the same number of total illegal aliens the agency said it encountered during all four fiscal years of the Trump administration.
Between the start of fiscal year 2017 on Oct. 1, 2016, and the end of fiscal year 2020 on Sept. 30, 2020, which represents most of the time Donald Trump was president, the Border Patrol encountered a total of 1,952,654 illegal aliens from nations around the world at the southern border, according to CBP data.
When combined, the number of encounters of illegal aliens from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras fell to 25,011 in June, a new low not seen since Trump’s last month in office.
3. Fracking
Bash reminded Harris Thursday night that in 2019, Harris said “there is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,”
“Do you still want to ban fracking?”
“No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking,” Harris said. “As vice president I did not ban fracking, as president I will not ban fracking.”
During her debate with then Vice President Mike Pence in 2020, Harris twice said, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”
4. ‘Opportunity Economy’
The economy and inflation remain the top issues for voters in the 2024 election. If elected, Harris says she will begin “implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy” on day one.
The Democratic candidate’s economic plan includes “what we’re going to do to bring down the cost of everyday goods, what we’re going to do to invest in America’s small businesses, what we’re going to do to invest in families, for example, extending the child tax credit to $6,000 for families for the first year of their child’s life,” Harris said. “There’s the work that we’re going to do that is about investing in the American family around affordable housing, a big issue in our country right now.”
But Harris’ economic plan has all the elements of “21st-century socialism,” according to Daniel Lacalle, economist and fund manager. In a recent column for The Daily Signal, Lacalle says Harris’ plan to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy will result in “more inflation, a hidden tax, for you.”
“Following the Harris plan, the United States public debt will likely increase by $24 trillion in a decade,” according to Lacalle.
America’s national debt has increased over $7 trillion since the start of the Biden-Harris administration.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
It doesn’t matter a bit that these articles analyze this interview and refute her claims with facts. The people determined to vote for her couldn’t care less about facts even if they knew them. They are voting for her because of one or two things:
1. They have an irrational hatred for Trump (TDS)
2. She’s a female.
But… the excitement among those who are bused to her rallies from out of state, or paid to attend, or who are there to see a concert (not her), or the few left outside the draped-off areas of the venue, or who are within the tight-angle view of the otherwise empty public school gymnasium, or the paid actors who are bused into a business after all the customers are kicked out for the photo op is E-L-E-C-T-R-I-C.
Biden/Harris are Satan’s minions.
Harris/Walz are Satan’s minions.
The apostle Paul describes them: “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no wonder that his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.”