Fans of Bruce Lee movies know they’re going to get plenty of awesome fight scenes in which the late-martial arts god single-handedly wipes out an army of badly voice-tracked bad guys. Rhetorically speaking, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, did the same to all comers in Tuesday’s first — and only — vice presidential debate of the campaign season.
Vance, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, didn’t simply wipe the floor with his overmatched opponent, Minnesota leftist Gov. Tim Walz. He took it to the Dem-friendly CBS News duo moderating the debate, and an accomplice media that has gotten away with nothing less than journalistic murder and election interference this presidential election cycle.
Vance was exceedingly lethal on one of the biggest issues coloring the race: the border crisis manufactured by Pretender-in-Chief Joe Biden and his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s hope to hold the White House. Walz, Harris’ No. 2, recited from the script in defending the indefensible and butchering the facts.
Yet, it was Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan who broke debate protocol in falsely fact-checking Vance in arguably the most campaign-defining moment of the night.
‘Stop the Bleeding’
Brennan, who joined CBS Evening News anchor Nora O’Donnell in moderating the latest faux debate, hit Vance with the kind of narrative-drenched question that we’ve come to expect from a corporate media clearly in the bag for Harris-Walz. Noting that Trump has pledged to implement large-scale deportations of illegal aliens if he wins next month’s election, Brennan imperiously asked Vance, “Would you deport parents who have entered the U.S. illegally and separate them from any of their children who were born on U.S. soil?”
“You have two minutes,” the moderator warned.
Vance, cool as the other side of the pillow as the late-ESPN anchor Stuart Scott used to say, didn’t take the bait. Instead, while answering Brennan’s question, the senator directed the attention to where it truly belongs — nearly four years of open border policies under Biden-Harris.
He said America needs to “stop the bleeding.”
“We have a historic immigration crisis because Kamala Harris started and said she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies,” he said.
While a rebuilt presidential candidate Harris has made astonishing claims about her support for building a border wall and ending unchecked asylum, the Democrat has a long and well-documented record of open-arms policies on illegal immigration. She has supported decriminalizing illegal border crossings, insisting that “an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” In her abysmal 2019 presidential campaign, Harris said one of her first acts in office would be to shut down immigration detention centers and take an ax to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically re-examine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing,” Harris told MSNBC in 2018. “And we need to probably think about starting from scratch.” It was part of Harris’ “reimagine” law enforcement concept that she sold in a Democratic primary where the candidates scurried to out-left each other.
Those positions don’t sell so well in a general election in which a majority of Americans see illegal immigration as a “critical threat” to the nation and most support Trump’s border wall. They also support his plan to deploy troops to secure the border and keep illegals out. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans (54%) support mass deportations, according to Scripps News/Ipsos poll — a point Brennan conceded.
‘The Real Family-Separation Policy’
Vance said deportations should begin with the hundreds of thousands of illegals charged or convicted of some crime beyond entering the country illegally. ICE recently reported that more than 662,000 individuals under the agency’s supervision have been convicted or are accused of criminal charges. The vast majority were not in custody. Those not detained, over the span of many years, include 13,099 individuals charged with homicides, 15,811 sexual assault suspects and convicts, and 13,423 charged with weapons offenses.
“I think you start with deportations on those folks,” Vance said.
“And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers,” the senator added, speaking to the millions of blue-collar Americans frustrated by crippling inflation and worried about the economy. “And by the way, that will be good news for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.”
Then Vance turned Brennan’s question about separating families on its empty head.
“Final point, Margaret. You asked about family separation. Right now, in this country we had 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” he said. “Some of them have been sex-trafficked, some of them are hopefully at home with their families, some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules.”
“The real family-separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’ wide open southern border.”
A DHS inspector general report issued in August shows ICE has potentially lost track of some 300,000 children. “As of May 2024, ICE had not served NTAs [notices to appear] on more than 291,000 UCs who therefore do not yet have an immigration court date,” the report states. Another 32,000 are known to be lost, according to the Inspector General.
Following a softball question to Walz and snidely nudging the governor to respond to Vance’s factual summary of the situation, Brennan pressed the GOP vice presidential candidate.
“The question was, will you separate parents from their children even if their kids are U.S. citizens?” the moderator demanded. “You have one minute.”
“My point is we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border,” Vance shot back.
Magic Deal
The pathological Walz, the human sprinkler of lying, was forced to stand by the campaign’s tired spin about a magical, bipartisan Senate bill that would have healed the sucking chest wound of a border crisis of the Biden-Harris administration’s making. Said border bill was a joke. It aimed to codify the Biden administration open border policies, offering that the president “may” close the border but only after allowing as many as 5,000 illegal immigrants per day to cross. The brunt of the $20 billion funding package would have been spent “to more efficiently process and disperse illegal immigrants throughout America — the vast majority of whom do not have valid asylum claims,” Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., wrote in May.
Walz, as Harris has insisted, claims the bipartisan deal that uniparty maestro and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., worked on from behind the curtain, was ultimately euthanized by Trump.
“As soon as that was getting ready to pass, Donald Trump said no because it gives him a campaign issue,” Walz said. “What would Donald Trump talk about if we actually did some of these things?”
That’s the point, Einstein. Trump and Vance have hammered it home on the campaign trail. Biden and Harris have had more than 3 1/2 years to fix what they have broken. Instead, Biden spent his opening days in office undoing the border security initiatives that Trump made happen through executive order.
Walz asserts that the same geniuses that have presided over an unprecedented influx of illegal aliens could “solve” the problem if it wasn’t for that meddling Trump, who, for some reason, wants to make the border crisis “an issue.”
‘What’s Actually Going On’
Walz and his moderator partners in crime played up corporate media’s Springfield, Ohio, narrative that Trump and his running mate have politicized the wave of Haitian refugees dropped into the Rust Belt town by the Biden administration. Residents have complained about the strain on resources, the uptick in crime and car crashes, and the culture clashes. The accomplice media have feverishly worked to silence discontent from citizens. Doing his best imitation of presidential candidate Kamala Harris circa 2019, Walz accused Vance and Trump of “villainizing” and “dehumanizing” the migrants for talking about the growing frustration and discontent of Springfield residents.
Brennan couldn’t help herself. Despite CBS News opting to not engage in real-time fact-checking as ABC News did in one-sided fashion during last month’s presidential debate, the moderator attempted to correct Vance on the Haitian issue.
“Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status,” she said, turning to her co-moderator with a warm sense of self-satisfaction.
Vance quickly attempted to correct the record, forced to factcheck the fact checker.
“Margaret,” he said, as the reporter tried to stifle the senator and move on. “The rules are that you guys weren’t going to factcheck, and since you’re factchecking me I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.”
Vance noted the CBP One app, which allows an illegal immigrant to apply for asylum or parole “and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.”
“That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting 10 years. That is the facilitation of illegal immigration by our own leadership,” Vance said.
“Thank you, senator, for describing the legal process. We have so much to get to,” Brennan churlishly interrupted.
Soon after, debate producers cut Vance’s microphone, then Walz’s.
But not before the Bruce Lee of vice presidential debates treated the less-than-impartial moderators to the ‘Way of the Intercepting [Rhetorical] Fist.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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