Kamala

By Alex Nicholson/JBS member

Kamala Harris is a political chameleon.  To some degree, this is an accusation that can be leveled at many politicians, if not most, across party lines.  She’s hardly the first to flipflop on her positions, evade tough questions, or have an on-again-off-again relationship with the truth.  But what is unique about Harris is the sheer scale to which she does these things, and the complicity of the media in helping her get away with them.  There doesn’t seem to be even one single issue on which the Vice President has not waffled or reversed herself.  Taking her statements at face value, one could essentially divide Kamala Harris into four entirely separate politicians with four completely contradictory belief systems.  If she is elected, the voter has no way of knowing which one she’ll govern as, and frankly, even if we could, none of the four are Presidential material.

Kamala One is the persona she took on as District Attorney of San Francisco and later Attorney General of California.  On the surface, Kamala One might seem like an appealing law and order candidate, but if you look deeper, you’ll find a tyrant.  This version of Kamala didn’t consider the powers of a prosecutor to have any limits, and really didn’t care whose rights got trampled on pursuing her version of order.  This was the Kamala who was so famously destroyed on the debate stage by Tulsi Gabbard for defying court orders by keeping prisoners incarcerated after they had already served their time to use them as expendable firefighting cannon fodder, and who suppressed exculpatory evidence against a likely innocent man who to this day is still on death row because of her.  Her solution to every problem from truancy to inconvenient journalism is to attempt to imprison somebody.  One can only imagine what she would start doing to political foes with the justice department at her command.

Kamala Two is the version of Harris that served in the Senate, carving out a niche as its furthest left, most progressive member, even past Bernie Sanders, according to voting record aggregators such as GovTrack, who have since attempted to scrub these records from the internet in compliance with her attempts to rebrand herself.  Two is, essentially, a communist, entirely eschewing any sort of bipartisanship and favoring only the most extreme expansions of government and redistributions of wealth, voting for open borders and championing the Green New Deal.  Even faced with a Republican congress, Kamala Two’s efforts to spend America into a second great depression would likely cause a drastic worsening of congressional gridlock, but the damage she could do with a favorable legislature would simply be incalculable.

Kamala Three is the person who ran in the 2020 Democrat primaries, and the scariest of the lot.  Attempting to define herself in a crowded field, this Kamala embraced the culture war, making #MeToo, cancel culture, and wokeness central to her platform, to impose on America as an all-encompassing, totalitarian agenda.  She is out on the furthest left fringes of every cultural issue, from “abortion” after birth, taxpayer funding of sex changes for illegal aliens, gun confiscation by executive order, reparations paid to those who were never slaves from those who never owned slaves, and on and on to the bleeding edges of woke insanity.  Three embraces a vision of an America reorganized along the progressive stack, with a person’s place in society determined by how many supposedly oppressed categories they can squeeze themselves into for extra status.

Kamala Four, now endorsed by Dick Cheney, of all people, is essentially a neocon on everything but abortion.  Selected rather than elected, handed the nomination without having to earn the votes of her party’s base in a primary, she has been free to simply claim that her positions are whatever she thinks Pennsylvania wants to hear.  On some issues, she has even attempted to out-Trump Trump.  On paper, she might thusly seem palatable to conservatives…until one remembers why the Cheneys like her so much.  As she made plain on the debate stage, she is the candidate of war.  Perpetual war all over the world, constantly draining American blood and treasure into the coffers of the military industrial complex.  That would be bad enough even if done competently, imagine what it would look like helmed by the self-described “last person in the room” for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal that claimed 13 American lives and left the Taliban billions of dollars worth of American weapons and equipment.

So who is Kamala Harris, really?  Two months of campaigning, one supervised interview and one comically over-moderated debate later, we still don’t know.  The only throughline of her political career is a deep authoritarian streak.  Whatever she claims to stand for at the moment, she wants ruthlessly enforced on everyone.  Despite this, she rarely follows her own rules, and when caught in these double standards, her response is usually laughter.  Her inability to control her giddiness in these situations suggests an unnerving conclusion: Kamala Harris’ contradictions are by design, because she is the kind of person who enjoys hypocrisy, who gets a thrill from publicly espousing morals she privately ignores.  And there is no personality type more dangerous with power.