Kamala’s Ministry of Truth

Did I just fall out of a coconut tree? How else to explain the dizziness so many of us are feeling at the speed of Kamala Harris’s coronation – and at the contortions now being performed to present her as the saviour of the beleaguered Democrats, if not of American democracy itself.

Within 48 hours of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race on Sunday, Vice-President Harris had clinched enough delegates, donors and Democratic power-brokers to ensure her an unchallenged, uncontested path to becoming the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump this autumn. The last dominos to fall, Barack and Michelle Obama, today offered a full-throated endorsement of Harris, claiming she has the ‘vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands’.

Since Harris emerged as the frontrunner, the Democrats’ media cheerleaders appear to have been gripped by a nasty bout of Kamalamania. ‘Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States. Democracy will survive’, declared one Hollywood celeb. She brings the ‘political power of joy’ and ‘effervescent vibes’ to US politics, according to a New York Times columnist. CNN reporters have been gushing over her choice of hoodie and sneakers. As Jenny Holland wrote on spiked earlier this week, the media are eager to present Harris as ‘Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all rolled into one’.

We need to remember who we’re talking about here. The newly anointed Democratic nominee was someone few believed could win the presidency, only a few weeks ago. Indeed, this is widely understood to be behind the Obamas’ hesitancy to back her – and Biden’s own reluctance to hand over the baton to his veep.

It’s not hard to see why. Harris is a politician who exudes negative charisma. She speaks like a cross between a Calfornian self-help guru – her favoured aphorism is ‘What can be, unburdened by what has been’ – and a primary-school teacher who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine at lunchtime. She laughs and cackles at inopportune moments, often to herself. At times, her speech is as incoherent as the mentally frail Joe Biden’s. Who could forget her nonsensical remarks last year at a White House function in which she asked: ‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’ Good luck translating that into English for swing voters in Pennsylvania.

We know that Harris is unpopular with the public, because she has been tested before. Her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 had to be suspended two months before the first primary vote in order to avoid total humiliation at the ballot box. Nationally, Harris was polling at just three per cent. Even in her home state of California, she could only muster eight per cent. Yet now she is about to become the Democratic contender for the White House, with zero input from the public or the party grassroots.

This is a candidate with no firm principles or fixed moral code – surely a non-starter for a would-be saviour of the republic. She has flip flopped on just about every major policy question. She has been both for and against universal healthcare. For and against the death penalty. She was tough on crime in the 2000s and 2010s, when she was attorney general of San Francisco and then California, but a ‘defund the police’ cheerleader during the George Floyd riots of 2020. Her 2020 presidential campaign had no clear message or platform, and even close aides would joke about just how many slogans and one-liners she adopted and then quickly disposed of.

Hers is also a career pockmarked with scandal and failure. As attorney general of California she tried to block the use of vital evidence that could have freed a prisoner from death row. As US vice-president, she was put in charge of the southern border, which has devolved into total chaos – and is one of the key factors behind Trump’s resurgence in the polls. Her office is widely known to be dysfunctional, plagued with extraordinarily high staff turnover and allegations of bullying.

So how, then, has Kamala Harris become such a serious contender for the leader of the free world? Everyone knows that her rise to the vice-presidency has little to do with her competence, character or political principles – and just about everything to do with her immutable characteristics. This was made explicit back in 2020. As the New York Times reported at the time, Biden’s VP selection committee was excited by ‘the racial diversity she would bring to the ticket’, given her half-Indian, half-Jamaican background. Biden vowed to select a female running mate, and then was placed under extraordinary pressure to make sure she was black. As recently as May this year, President Biden celebrated how his VP’s mixed-race heritage was an embodiment of the ‘the values of diversity, equality, inclusion’ (DEI).

Yet all of this is now being swiftly memory-holed. The mainstream media have not only gushed sycophantically over the prospect of a Harris presidency – they are also acting like Kamala’s very own Ministry of Truth.

The suggestion that Kamala’s climb up the greasy pole of politics might have had anything to do with DEI has been denounced as racist disinformation. Apparently, to call Harris a ‘DEI candidate’ is ‘offensive and insulting’, a ‘racial slur’ and a ‘racist dog whistle’. Even now, as the Obamas hail the ‘historic’ potential of placing a woman of colour in the White House, even as Democrats issue stern instructions to white voters to back her on that basis, we are forced to pretend her race and gender have not been factors in her elevation.

The Orwellianism doesn’t stop there. Propagandists who self-identify as journalists have been busy disappearing Harris’s record, particularly when it comes to the southern border. On Wednesday, a fact-check by Stef Kight of Axios informed readers that: ‘The Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the “border czar” title – which she never actually had.’ Really? Back in 2021, Axios published multiple reports on Harris’s appointment as Biden’s ‘border czar’. Helpfully, one headline even spelled out precisely what that title meant: ‘Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.’ The author of that piece? None other than Stef Kight of Axios, who now denies that Harris had any real responsibility for the border.

Ostensibly neutral and fact-based websites have also joined in the memory-holing of uncomfortable truths about Kamala. The vice-president was briefly removed from Wikipedia’s ‘List of US executive-branch czars’, although her name has since been restored, seemingly after one volunteer editor called out the ‘blatant propaganda and revisionism’. Govtrack, an organisation that tracks congressional voting records, has unpublished one of its reports from 2019, which named Harris as that year’s ‘most-liberal senator’, presumably because it has been cited by the Trump campaign in its attacks. And just like that, Commissar Kamala vanishes.

Let’s be frank, ‘President Harris’ was always going to be a difficult sell. An atrocious public speaker with a terrible track record and no political principles is not exactly an inspiring offer. But even by the Democrats’ and the media’s recent standards, the campaign for Kamala is plumbing new Orwellian depths. The voters are being taken for fools.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.