The ‘real’ Kamala

I write at the end of July, just on the threshold of the “silly season,” “the months of August and September, when newspapers supply the lack of real news by articles or discussions on trivial topics.”

I think the season may have come a bit early this year. That, anyway, is how I am interpreting the sudden tsunami of gossip, prognostication, animadversion and speculation about certified female-of-color Kamala Harris.

By the time you read this, some of the frenzy surrounding Harris may have abated. But for the time being the news is full-to-gagging with puppies and unicorn stories about how strong, dynamic and potentially transformative she is.

Also, it may not be amiss to point out, she is not Donald Trump.

Watching the makeover has been partly amusing, partly alarming. The amusing part is that no matter what CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and kindred bottom-feeding propaganda outlets say about how absolutely supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Harris suddenly is, no one believes it. It’s party hats and ice cream for everyone — even the Obamas took a lick when, finally, they endorsed her — but though many are called, here too only a few are chosen.

As I write, Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, are holding a rally in Minnesota that has attracted a capacity crowd of thousands upon thousands. At the same time, Team Harris organized a rally, or Tupperware party, in Philadelphia to which sixty-eight people showed up.

I chalk that up under signs and portents.

All that, as I say, is amusing. What’s not so funny are the efforts, subtle as well as blatant, to rewrite history, cover Harris’s tracks and warp public opinion. Wikipedia has published rewritten articles about Harris, downplaying her role in the ongoing disaster that is the Biden-Harris border policy failure. YouGov, supposedly a neutral site, has altered its information about Harris’s record, downplaying her extreme left-wing views and activities.

Until Joe Biden dropped out of the race and it was time to sanitize her image, Harris was universally acknowledged to have been his “border czar.” That phrase has been dropped into the political oubliette. Harris enthusiastically supported the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. Scores were injured and $2 billion in property damage was exacted from communities across the country during those “mostly peaceful protests.” Efforts to memory-hole that upsurge of violent anomie are underway, too. Harris has repeatedly called for defunding the police and has multiple ties to radical left-wing groups not only in the United States but in the Chinese Communist Party. You won’t hear about that, either.

Will the effort to normalize Kamala Harris work? I doubt it. For one thing, the official narrative has been robustly supplemented by critical voices who remember the bumbling, painfully inarticulate and astonishingly incompetent Kamala Harris who was a fixture during the first three and a half years of Joe Biden’s presidency. Are people’s memories that short?

For another thing, it’s the same Kamala Harris being wheeled out in front of the cameras. She’s been briefed, prepped, dusted off and given new scripts and acres of emollient publicity. But the real Kamala keeps peeking through. The Venn-diagram Kamala. The significance-of-the-passage-of-time Kamala. The cackling Kamala, dear God. It’s not a pretty sight. No one is fooled, even if her handlers and cheerleaders say otherwise.

What we are witnessing in this country is a slow-motion takeover of our governing institutions by a confect of neo-Marxist forces. Kamala is part of the process. The hordes of illegal immigrants, the lawfare, the weaponization of the Department of Justice. The insinuation of corrosive “woke” attitudes and regulations everywhere from schools and churches to government bureaucracies. Kamala is the panting mascot of this onslaught. It will be interesting to see whether the Deep State is able to bring sufficient hanky-panky to bear to effect her election.

Again, I doubt it. But it will also be interesting to see what will happen when Kamala disintegrates in the polls before the election. Probably, the Dems will have managed to keep her afloat, more or less, through the convention. Then it will be scorched earth. Will the Deep State figure out some way to do to her what they just did to Joe Biden? I don’t quite see how that would work, but one never knows.

In his devastating anatomy of philosophical idealism, the Australian philosopher David Stove offered some excellent advice for maintaining cognitive sanity. “All sane use of language,” he notes, “requires that we never relax our grip on the tautology that when we speak of kangaroos, it is kangaroos of which we speak.”

There is more wisdom in that squirt of anti-idealistic common sense than will be found in many long philosophical treatises. Stove’s observation even has some political significance. When we speak of anti-democratic efforts to overturn the rule of law, individual liberty and the sacrosanctity of private property, it is just those things of which we speak. No amount of “woke” frosting can change that.

The eighteenth-century divine Joseph, Bishop Butler put the point crisply. “Everything,” he wrote in one of his sermons, “is what it is, and not another thing.” Kamala Harris and her masters in the panopticon should fear the circulation of that truth.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.