[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]

Philadelphia Democrats were all geared up for a Harris-Shapiro ticket when they prepared to gather at Temple University’s Liacouras Center on August 6th, when Kamala Harris would announce her pick for VP.

The official press organ for WHYY, Billy Penn, hosted a big headline that day reminding readers that they would soon learn whether Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s popular governor, would be named as Harris’ running mate. Most believed that Shapiro was a certainty–and why not? Mayor Cherelle Parker was gung-ho for a Harris-Shapiro ticket and so was the Philly Democrat machine, which saw the Shapiro VP option as the surest way to beat Trump.

Ironically, just a few days before the rally, a video from Mayor Parker’s office was released showing Harris, Shapiro and the mayor together — which seemed to suggest that Harris had already made her pick when the reality was quite the opposite: the video was merely a fantasy of Mayor Parker’s “dream ticket.”

The ambiguous video made the rounds among Philly progressives under the label: “Proud to be back with so many leaders from across our region supporting @KamalaHarris for President and @JoshShapiroPA for VP! We are One CITY, One REGION, and ONE Commonwealth United!”

A Philly radical black activist/journalist jumped into the fray — Ernest Owens, a local woke journalist and author of the book, The Case for Cancel Culture — who promoted the fake clip on social media as the final word regarding Harris’ selection.

It was a Woodward-and-Bernstein moment for the city’s fanatical anti-Trumpers, although very quickly the scoop that Shapiro would be VP was debunked as premature but still possible. Philly Dems — perhaps aware on some level of Harris’ relatively untested intellect — knew that having Shapiro on the ticket would mainstream Harris and win her Pennsylvania and possibly the presidency.

Philly Democrats — many of whom are social activist Jews with an allegiance to Israel — are experiencing consternation as they watch their party turn increasingly Pro-Palestinian. While some pro-Israel Jewish voters in the city have switched to Trump, the majority — including several friends of mine — have opted to suffer silently on the sidelines and hope that their Democratic party will soon come to its senses.

The Liacouras Center, the site of the Harris rally, is a creepy place from an “architectural” point of view. Some buildings just don’t feel right. Maybe they’re built on bad ground or have a history that works to produce negative feelings in people, but whatever it is, the Liacouras Center has it in spades. The 10,206-seat multi-purpose venue opened in 1997. During COVID it was used as a makeshift vaccination/hospital area. In 2016, the venue had to deal with a bomb threat. Hilary Clinton appeared there with her VP running mate Tim Kaine the day after her 2016 DNC coronation.

Trump held his first Philadelphia rally at the Liacouras Center on June 22, 2024, a week before his debate with President Biden. He did not fill the arena to capacity because Philly is in the so-called Dumb Belt and will vote for any Democrat — criminal, murderer, or saint — over any Republican no matter what.

When Donald Trump finished his June 2024 speech at the Center, two Democrat activists shared videos of the event on X. Both showed the upper seating tiers of the arena appearing empty. “Look at all those empty seats in Philadelphia,” one of the activists wrote. “Old man can’t even fill a high school gym anymore. Sad.”

While a half-empty arena was indeed sad for Trump, it is immeasurably sadder for Philadelphia, a city that has always been “corrupt and contented” in its political nearsightedness. Philly is also a city that has a special contempt for Donald J. Trump, so much so that when Biden won in 2020 Center City residents took to the streets with bottles of champagne, blowing horns and pounding drums in a celebration that lasted for hours.

When Harris finally dispelled the Shapiro VP rumors for good and confirmed that Tim Walz was to be her VP pick, the “toot” went out of Mayor Parker’s horn. The writing, for many, was clearly on the wall: rapidly growing pro-Palestinian elements within the Democrat party no doubt had a say in convincing Harris to send Shapiro back to Harrisburg.

Yet Philly took to Walz, a so-called Happy Warrior in the Minnesota Hubert H. Humphrey tradition — at least superficially. Underneath his “Aw, shucks best-granddad-in the-world” veneer, one will find a committed liar and a Marxist con man.

After all, it was Walz who told MSNBC that “There’s no guarantee to free speech or misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy.”

This statement aligns well with the innumerable little signs in many Philly row houses (“Hate Has No Home Here”) which suggest that if you disagree with any part of the trans agenda — namely gender care and surgeries for minors and children — that your heart is full of hate.

And just like the liberal Democrat reaction in Philly in 2020 when BLM and Antifa were setting fires to businesses all over the city, including historic Rittenhouse Square, Walz looked the other way while Minneapolis was burned and looted, waiting days before calling in the National Guard because he believed that the rioters were expressing a real beef: they were reacting to “sins” against equity, equality and diversity.

Walz, like much of Philly City Council in 2020, was also a staunch advocate of defunding the police. Like the Philly press at that time, he also played Marxist tricks with language, calling the violent Floyd riots peaceful and those arrested for violence and looting “protesters” rather than criminals.

Philly, as a sanctuary city, can also relate to Walz’s stand on illegal aliens — or “immigrants” as the Dems have quaintly renamed them. Walz allowed illegal aliens to get driver’s licenses and free health care while Philly’s then-mayor Jim Kenney danced an Irish jig in his office when the courts ruled the city could retain its sanctuary city status.

“Make Abortion Great Again” Philly, with its termite hordes of dangerous white, woke, liberal women — many of whom live in former Republican strongholds like Chester County — see in Walz a supreme ally who as governor signed a bill allowing abortion up to the moment of birth.

In fact, as The Catholic Register reported, “A Minnesota law that had been on the books since 1976 required responsible medical personnel to use ‘all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice to ‘preserve the life and health of the born alive infant.’”

Governor Walz signed new legislation into law in May 2023 that got rid of the word “preserve” and replaced it with the phrase, “to care for the infant who is born alive.”

As pro-lifers have testified, this small change is disturbing because “to care for” can also mean leaving the baby unattended so that it dies from lack of medical attention.

As I am quickly discovering, Philly Democrats “stand with her” — Harris — even if that means ignoring Walz’s lies about carrying arms in combat when he never saw combat and abandoned his troops to avoid deployment to Iraq.

All of which brings me to tampons.

While there are no tampon machines in boys’ fourth-grade bathrooms in the Philadelphia School system, with Walz as the guiding Dem Marxist star, that might soon become a reality in the City of “Dumb” Brotherly Love.