A stunning cascade of events in June and July saw President Biden fall out of favor among his elite supporters and withdraw abruptly from the presidential race, to be replaced as a candidate by his underachieving vice president, Kamala Harris. Harris has enjoyed little news coverage since the 2020 election, and such attention as she has garnered has been largely unfavorable. Yet despite strong reservations about her candidacy being voiced by some in the Democratic Party (such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York), Harris somehow underwent a total media makeover in a single week, transformed by the magic of astroturfed hype from a ditzy California liberal with an off-putting laugh into a hip, savvy policy maven raised up by destiny to be Donald Trump’s electoral nemesis.

Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, to an Indian-American mother and a Jamaican-American father. Her mother, a successful endocrinologist, and her father, an economics professor in the post-Keynesian tradition, were divorced when Kamala was seven. Harris lived around the United States and in Canada while growing up, but ended up attending law school in California, where she graduated in 1989 and was admitted to the bar in 1990.

The ambitious Harris soon became a fixture in left-wing California politics. As deputy district attorney in Alameda County in the early 1990s, she began publicly dating Willie Brown, the married speaker of the California Assembly. Brown, who had a reputation not only for public extramarital dalliances but also for elevating his cronies to lucrative positions in the state government, appointed Harris in 1994 to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. Subsequently, he appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time:

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.

Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.

Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.”…

Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year. 

In 2024 dollars, those two salaries equate to $151,000 and $206,000, respectively. 

In 1998, Harris moved to San Francisco to become an assistant district attorney, and six years later she was elected district attorney of the City by the Bay. In that capacity she served for two terms, until 2011. Among her more-celebrated achievements were creating new units for environmental crimes and hate crimes, her efforts to ban all gun shows within city limits, and her opposition to the death penalty. She also led a group of prosecutors seeking to influence the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision on the Second Amendment.

After two terms as San Francisco DA, Harris became California’s attorney general in 2011. During her six-year term, she fought to invalidate California’s Prop 8, which defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. She worked to overturn California’s ban on affirmative action, and supported a bill to microstamp firearms, to make it easier for the state of California to track them.

On the rise: As attorney general of California, Kamala Harris presided over a state in decline. Today’s blighted Golden State landscape of homeless encampments and smash-and-grab mobs is a consequence of policies she and other woke California law enforcers (such as current AG Rob Bonta) have pursued. (AP Images)

National Debut

Kamala Harris first burst upon the national scene in 2017, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate. Her three years as California’s junior senator solidified her image as a radical-left reactionary and one of Trump’s most vicious detractors on Capitol Hill. For one thing, she quickly staked out a position as one of the most anti-gun legislators in Washington — she was a co-sponsor of bills aimed at requiring universal background checks, banning so-called assault weapons, and imposing yet more unconstitutional federal controls on gun dealers. She was one of the most visible ringleaders of the Democratic parliamentary revolt during the Senate confirmation hearing of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and has since raged against Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees, whom she blames for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She also supported and co-sponsored the Green New Deal in 2019, baring her radical-left environmentalist leanings for all to see.

On immigration-related issues, which have since become the defining issue of her term as vice president, then-Senator Harris opined in 2018 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should probably be scrapped, telling MSNBC, “I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically re-examine ICE and its role and the way that it is being administered and the work it is doing, and we need to probably think about starting from scratch.” Also in 2018, during a confirmation hearing for Ronald Vitiello, whom Trump had nominated to lead ICE, Harris compared the public image of ICE to that of the KKK, helping to lay a rhetorical foundation for outrageous media lies in 2021 about ICE agents whipping illegal Haitian immigrants with riding crops.

Radical Views

It was during the 2020 presidential campaign, however, that Kamala Harris’ leftist bona fides really burst forth. On abortion, Harris made it clear that Roe v. Wade did not go far enough, in her view. She proposed additional federal abortion protections, including a requirement for federal “pre-clearance” of any state abortion laws. Harris continues to rail against Trump for the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and will doubtless make it a prominent part of her 2024 presidential campaign. 

Following the infamous George Floyd riots in Minneapolis in May and June of 2020, Harris lent public support to the rioters (whom she euphemistically called “protesters”) on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. After Colbert commented, “I know there are protests still happening in major cities across the United States, I’m just not seeing the reporting on it that I had for the first few weeks,” Harris replied:

That’s right. But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.

In June 2020, Harris also publicly supported a bail fund, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, set up in support of jailed BLM protesters in Minneapolis, an act that contributed to her low popularity ratings even among Democrats. The fund, which is still in operation, has become an all-purpose slush fund providing bail money for blacks accused of violent crimes. Several of the individuals bailed out by the fund Harris supports subsequently committed violent offenses, including murder. One of the most notorious so far is 48-year-old George Howard, who, scant weeks after being enabled by the Minnesota Freedom Fund to bail out of domestic assault charges, got into an altercation on the highway and shot to death a 38-year-old motorist, Luis Damian Martinez Ortiz.

Harris also came out in support of providing full-service healthcare, including Medicare, to illegal aliens. She has supported amnesty for illegals and backed sanctuary cities. 

On guns, Harris was unafraid to proclaim as a presidential candidate that she supported mandatory gun “buybacks.” Building on her earlier support and sponsorship of the Green New Deal, she called for reductions in red meat consumption in the name of fighting climate change, and supported bans on both fracking and offshore drilling.

With such a radical-left resumé, not at all unexpected for a politician from San Francisco but far outside the Overton window of Middle America, it is little wonder that Harris’ first presidential campaign foundered badly, polling in the low single digits in a crowded field (beneath even Michael Bloomberg when he had not even declared his candidacy). Faced with incontrovertible evidence that her dog and pony show would not play well in flyover country, Harris dropped out of the race before the first primary was even held, and that, we all assumed, was that. 

But for logic-defying reasons of his own, equally improbable presidential nominee Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, and the rest is history. By fair means or foul (mostly, one supposes, the latter), the unlikely duo squeaked out a dubious win in the 2020 election. With much of the attention focusing on the improbable electoral miracle in which a semi-coherent, superannuated former vice president cowering in his basement had somehow managed to defeat a popular if unconventional sitting president, Vice President Kamala Harris faded from the front pages to fulfill mostly ornamental duties as Biden’s heir-in-waiting. 

It was broadly assumed that Biden had chosen the weakest, most vapid of all the candidates in a field crowded with weak, vapid entrants because he wanted “impeachment insurance.” Biden, after all, was keenly aware of his own shady dealings with corrupt foreign governments, as well as the outrageous lies, deceptions, and dirty tricks he and his Deep State enablers had resorted to in order to discredit Trump and bring down his entire administration (think Hunter Biden laptop disinformation). He was also planning to stake the heart of the orange vampire via a coordinated, utterly amoral campaign of lawfare against Trump, his associates, and anyone even peripherally involved in the events of January 6, 2021. Such a campaign would certainly trigger an indignant response from an outraged GOP. But with the clueless Kamala Harris as his successor, Biden would be insulated from any serious attempt to force him out of office.

This, at least, was the narrative most of us took for granted during those seemingly interminable years when we regarded with horror Biden’s dismaying incompetence coupled with his growing incapacitation — yet prayed he would limp across the finish line of his term in office to prevent Kamala, by all accounts an even worse choice, from becoming president.

Border Czarina

Early in his administration, Biden tasked Harris with working to solve the border crisis — supposedly. The press, in a Washington tradition stretching back decades, fondly dubbed Harris Biden’s “border czar.” Despite recent denials that any such title, honorary or otherwise, was ever conferred, the reality of Harris as “border czar” (or perhaps more accurately, “czarina”) was formalized by a congressional resolution, and is beyond any reasonable dispute. 

What is disputed is what, if anything, Harris ever did in this capacity. Most Americans probably assumed that the radical-left Kamala Harris would do nothing to discourage, and would likely even encourage, the new stampede of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers across the southern border, and that has proven to be the case. 

But idle she certainly was not. An oft-repeated lie of the Biden administration — that its hands are tied on the border unless Republicans pass enabling legislation — has long been used as an excuse for its inaction in securing the border post-Trump. With this lie as camouflage, Harris launched in 2021 the Partnership for Central America (PCA), which has been touted as a public-private partnership “working with businesses and social enterprises to make new, significant commitments to address the root causes of migration through economic opportunity in the region.” More specifically, the PCA under Harris’ leadership has been working allegedly to address “root causes” of illegal immigration (instead of securing the border itself), especially from the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras). This was to be done not only by encouraging private corporations to invest there, but also by channeling large amounts of U.S. foreign aid to the region as well. While claiming to be “independent, nongovernmental, and nonpartisan,” the PCA in fact “partners closely with the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID],” according to one article from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business’ Institute for Business in Society, another partner with the PCA. Writer Felipe Saffie explained the rationale for the PCA as follows:

Irregular migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to the United States is deeply rooted in a lack of economic opportunity, high levels of violence and citizen insecurity, an increase in climate volatility and a desire for family reunification…. Investments in education, health care and transportation infrastructure are needed to promote economic development, in addition to vocational and job training to develop a more skilled workforce.

This situation stems from a variety of structural factors, including low levels of private sector investment, low labor productivity and a lack of skilled workers, high levels of labor informality, and challenges in promoting the rule of law, sound governance, and legal certainty.

Governments, companies and institutions working together can work toward practical solutions, mobilize humanitarian aid and new investments, and offer hope and opportunity to potential migrants for a better life.

But Harris and the Biden administration were not alone in planning and launching the PCA. Shortly after the administration issued a “Call to Action” in conjunction with the rollout of the PCA in May 2021, Harris met personally with the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab to plan further action in alignment with the WEF’s oft-touted goal of “stakeholder capitalism.” Said Schwab at the time:

The Forum has been actively engaged in Latin America for decades, developing and supporting the implementation of a strategic agenda to address the region’s most pressing challenges and ensuring a robust participation of leaders. In response to this Call to Action, the World Economic Forum will convene a network of committed actors over time. The principles of Stakeholder Capitalism provide a fundamental guide for these actors on the role that long-term, sustainable investment can play.

The first 12 of those “committed actors” included Latin American corporations such as Bancolombia and the NGO Accion, as well as prominent North American companies such as yogurt manufacturer Chobani, online language school Duolingo, Mastercard, and Microsoft. The number of private partners with the PCA has since grown to more than 30, with the likes of textbook publisher Pearson, agrobusiness giant Cargill, and the George W. Bush Institute among more recent entrants.

But these venerable companies and NGOs are not lining up to pour money into the slums of Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa for purely altruistic motives. The public part of “public-private partnership” is being mustered as a guarantor for their investments. A parallel government initiative, Central America Forward, has been funneling both public and private money into the Northern Triangle to enhance job creation, workforce training, and access to credit for local workers — millions of them, according to a recent White House fact sheet. Of particular interest for our purposes was the creation by USAID of the Central America Service Corps (CASC), a fascist-style national service corps transparently modeled after Bill Clinton’s controversial AmeriCorps. This USAID-funded initiative will “work with over 60,000 vulnerable youth and offer them alternatives to irregular migration through community service projects and technical assistance to match youth to potential jobs, training and mentoring, facilitating financial inclusion efforts, and direct financial support through stipends.” Moreover, the activities of the CASC will be coordinated by USAID with the Peace Corps, the Inter-American Foundation, the U.S. Forest Service, and, of course, the PCA. In other words, thanks to Kamala Harris’ work, U.S. taxpayers are now subsidizing corrupt Central American governments at dizzying new levels, pouring foreign aid into jobs training, infrastructure projects, and legal reform, and enabling foreign companies to “invest” resources with American taxpayers acting as risk guarantors.

Harris has also personally set up the initiative In Her Hands (IHH), a “women’s economic security initiative” that, in conjunction with the PCA, is specifically targeting economic and social opportunities for women in the region by “promoting gender parity” and the Latin American equivalent of affirmative action aimed at “elevating women within companies across the region.”

In other words, far from ignoring the border issue, Harris has been very busy indeed — attacking the problem with all of the misplaced priorities of the radical Left. These priorities include ignoring actually securing the border, professing to attack the root cause of other countries’ government corruption by enlarging the involvement of the U.S. government, and encouraging the private sector to pour money into the local public sectors to create the usual mishmash of woke social programs targeting problems that only seem to be exacerbated by the involvement of leftist busybodies. The overarching imperative of American leftists such as Harris is, and always has been, feeling good about themselves rather than actually solving problems. Thanks to Harris and the PCA, leftist virtue signaling has become a major enterprise in Central America. Government and legal corruption in the region will continue to be subsidized, and the illegal immigration flow unabated, thanks to such meddling.

Border czarina: Harris speaks to the media after inspecting border and customs facilities in El Paso, Texas. Most of her interest in illegal immigration has been focused not on the border, but on certain countries, such as Guatemala and El Salvador, that are sources of illegal immigrants. (AP Images)

Elite Support

Yet the Powers That Be have already rebranded the clueless Harris as a foreign-policy force to be reckoned with, as evidenced by a hagiographic essay released by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on July 25. According to Linda Robinson, a CFR senior fellow for women and foreign policy, “Harris’s foreign policy experience has been far wider than recognized, equipping her to serve as the first woman president.” The CFR, for the uninitiated, has been America’s globalist foreign-policy establishment for more than a century, and, in coordination with various affiliates abroad, such as the U.K.’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, is the entity primarily responsible for keeping America firmly in the globalist camp and building up the UN-centered global political, financial, and military order. Harris herself is not a CFR member, but the organization (and with it, the entire globalist establishment) has obviously thrown its support wholeheartedly behind her candidacy, as evidenced by Robinson’s article. Harris has earned her spurs by dealing with a spate of “existential” issues, writes Robinson:

The issues that the Biden-Harris administration has faced during this term could not be more existential: Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, the first conventional war on European soil since World War II; strengthening and expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance; confronting a rising China with strong defense and a strategy to manage the most competitive geopolitical rivalry of our time; and grappling with rapid technological and climate change that is altering the foundation and fabric of life, to mention a few of the daily challenges.

Left unmentioned, conveniently, is the fact that certain of those problems (China and Ukraine) have been exacerbated by Biden administration policies, and other debacles, such as Afghanistan, passed unmentioned. After lamenting the “trivial” news coverage of Harris that plays into “sexist and racist stereotypes,” Robinson tries to burnish Harris’ foreign-policy credentials by pointing out that she “has regularly participated in Cabinet meetings and emergency meetings in the White House situation room and held frequent lunches with the president to discuss and advise him on the most pressing issues of the day” (are we to suppose that no other vice president has ever done this?), and that Harris “has been given critical substantive foreign policy portfolios to manage as vice president” — including the aforementioned one on immigration. Robinson writes approvingly of Harris’ work with the PCA, reminding her readers that

The vice president led a $5 billion increase in private investment and bilateral aid to address root causes of crime, poverty, and unemployment that propel migration and set up offices in origin countries to allow asylum seekers to apply there rather than attempt the life-threatening journey through jungles alone or with coyotes who prey on the vulnerable. In the course of this work, Harris met with the heads of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras and led the U.S. delegation at the 2022 Summit of the Americas. 

Robinson also discusses Harris’ meetings with world leaders, from Xi Jinping to Volodymyr Zelensky, and her trips to Asia and Africa, along with less-known activities such as her involvement with the National Space Council and her interest in AI. The message is clear: Kamala Harris, her deficiencies notwithstanding, is a reliable asset of the globalist establishment and, as president, will be surrounded by handpicked CFR experts who will ensure that her policy priorities remain in alignment with the internationalist agenda.

Abortion mission: A far-left radical, Harris has been one of the most vocal proponents of abortion on demand, and believed Roe v. Wade itself was not extreme enough. Here, Harris speaks in opposition to a Florida abortion law. (AP Images)

This, then, is the real Kamala Harris: radical-left social reformer and establishment-anointed globalist. Having been a behind-the-scenes policymaker for President Biden, a President Kamala Harris, we may confidently predict, will continue the foreign and domestic policies of Biden himself, to the continued benefit of globalist elites and to the usual detriment of the American people.