by Edward Ring
If you have ever confronted the astonishing hatred that San Francisco Bay Area Democrats have for anything Republican, much less MAGA Republican, then you understand why Kamala Harris may become the next president of the United States.
This isn’t a hate that is grounded in reality. It is nurtured by decades of propaganda, backed by trillions of dollars in big tech wealth, and, lately, the most powerful tools of mass hypnosis and Pavlovian conditioning the world has ever seen. If you question any of their pieties—climate, race, gender, Trump—you are instantly and permanently dehumanized. It is impossible to change their minds. There is no room for nuance. There is no tolerance for alternative perspectives. You are hated. You are garbage. Give up. Die.
This is Kamala Harris’s core constituency.
If you haven’t experienced the withering rebukes of San Francisco progressives or been the target of their white-hot rage, you might think Harris’s Portlandian drivel actually indicates a benevolent, if somewhat intellectually middling, soul. Her bird-brained new-age prognostications are certainly more humorous than fearsome:
“It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.”
“The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.”
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
It’s hard to ascribe malevolence to phrases like this. They’re the words of a vapid airhead, not a tyrant. On the other hand, Harris’s penchant for nodding her head in the affirmative as a way to punctuate literally everything she says is more than slightly ominous. It is a condescending, passive-aggressive way to telegraph what is actually a terrifying arrogance. I am right. You will agree. Nod your head with me. This is how it is.
Yikes.
Here’s what Kamala Harris is really about, and here’s what we are up against:
California is ruled by a coalition of extreme environmentalists, opportunistic business interests, the “renewables” lobby, the Homeless Industrial Complex, the DEI Industrial Complex, public sector unions, including the rabidly partisan and woke teachers union, and Hollywood, all backed by tech billionaires who wield stupefying wealth and influence.
At its roots, this is a coalition of lunatics, crooks, and amoral pragmatists. A prominent Democrat who was working on some genuine reforms once told me, “We had the Republicans at hello.” A businessman who supports Democrats once shared with me a similar sentiment. “Why should we back Republicans?” he said, “we’ve already got them.” And yet the Republicans, especially the “MAGA Republicans,” are the threat. Go figure.
This is a machine, and Harris is just a cog. Meanwhile, California is broken. People can’t afford homes or any other essentials, including gasoline, electricity, water, food, tuition, or health care. And the reason California is broken is because the economy is dominated by leeches who profit from inefficiency and failure and hide behind pessimistic narratives—climate doom, race and gender resentment.
Not every Democrat in California has bought the progressive narrative. Not every one of them has become usefully terrified of climate catastrophes, pervasive white bigotry, and MAGA fascists. Not every one of them has succumbed to apocalyptic fear and hence yielded to blinding hatred of the alleged deniers, bigots, Nazis and MAGA storm troopers on the brink of destroying the world.
No. Some of them are just practical. Do you want to do business in California? Play ball with the Democratic machine. Do you want to make incremental change? Maybe find some nonpartisan island of common sense and work towards at least one useful reform? Be a Democrat. To have credibility in California, that’s the price of admission. Which is to say, there are some Democrats in California trying to do some good.
The problem with this otherwise sound reasoning is that even Democrats with mostly good ideas are bound to have at least one issue where they are insanely, fatally flawed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a perfect example. On many critical issues, he is a breath of fresh air, a voice of honesty and courage. But on the issue of climate change, his positions are just as fascist, delusional and obedient to the doom narrative as the worst machine politician the Democrats can offer.
Which brings us back to Kamala Harris. She is going to represent the Democrats in the race for U.S. president for the same reason Joe Biden did. Just like Joe, she is a puppet. A cog in the machine. But make no mistake about the motivations of her donors. They want to rule the world. And make no mistake about her grassroots supporters. They have been manipulated into thinking of themselves as embattled warriors, fueled by a hatred they believe is righteous and justified.
The irony is deep and tragic. They are the Nazis they hate. They are the haters they hate. They are the puppets of the authoritarian machine they think they’re fighting.
As Kamala Harris spouts her goofy aphorisms, in between stoking her acolytes with fear and loathing, this machine is one election away from consolidating its power across America. If it wins, it will do to the entire country what it’s done to California.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Photo “Kamala Harris” by Kamala Harris.
