Catholics aren’t the only ones for which Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris doesn’t have much use. She also doesn’t think much of what we are told is a core constituency of her party: young people.
Or at least that’s what she said six years ago when she called them “stupid.”
Yet Harris now thinks Democrats should “listen” to young people and that the voting age should probably be lowered to 16.
Why Harris wants to listen to or give the vote to stupid people is anyone’s guess, although knowing they’ll likely vote for her party to get the “free” goodies it promises, without much thought of how to pay for the goodies, likely explains the seeming contradiction.
Listen to the Young
In the context of the chatter among cable news talking heads that Kamala Harris would bring young folks out to vote for the Democrat ticket, Breitbart dug up Harris’ claims that young people are stupid. It’s important because the top of the ticket is a 77-year-old man more ready to occupy an assisted living facility and play Mah Jong than move into the White House and grapple with China’s Xi Jinping.
Harris would “bridge” that gap.
Yet in 2014, Harris was very clear about the cerebral capacity of young people. They’re dopes. Speaking about drug users at an event sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Harris asked the audience a question: “What’s the other thing we know about this population? And it’s a specific phase of life. And remember, age is more than a chronological fact. What else do we know about this population, 18 through 24?”
“They are stupid,” she answered.
But Harris didn’t stop there. She sharpened the point by observing how we treat kids in college: “That is why we put them in dormitories, and they have a resident assistant. They make really bad decisions.”
So stupid people who make bad decisions should be allowed to vote?
Have the Conversation
Absolutely, Harris now says. And we should listen to them.
In June, the Associated Press asked Harris what presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden must do to get younger black and Latino voters to the ballot box.
“We need to listen,” she replied. “The strength and the beauty of this movement around policing is, I think, an extension of what I know from being on the campaign trail for a year, which is that there are a lot of issues that are impacting so-called younger voters that have gone unaddressed.”
One of the best ways to actually address those issues is to listen and let the people tell you their needs and tell you what they want. We have to listen to them, and we have to respond to their needs in a way that we provide them with their rightful role of leadership as opposed to expecting them to just follow.
That might explain why Harris said she just might give the franchise to 16-year-olds, or 10th graders, as Tucker Carlson mockingly called them.
“I’m really interested in having that conversation,” Harris said at CNN’s Presidential Town Hall at Harvard University last year:
I have to tell you that. I think that there is no question that if we are looking at what is going on in our country, we are putting more responsibilities on people at a younger age, and the larger number of people that we can involve in the electoral process, I think the more robust it would be.
The obvious rhetorical questions? If young people are stupid, why listen to them and permit them to vote?
Felons, Too
And young, stupid people who make bad decisions aren’t the only group to which Harris would give the vote.
She also favors giving felons the vote, another group of stupid people who make bad decisions.
Last year, when CNN talker Don Lemon asked Harris whether she agreed with Bernie Sanders that felons — even murderers and terrorists — should vote while they’re in prison, the woman who thinks members of the Knights of Columbus can’t be federal judges because they have bad judgment had a ready answer.
“I agree that the right to vote is one of the very important components of citizenship,” she told Lemon, “and it is something that people should not be stripped of needlessly, which is why I have been long an advocate of making sure that the formerly incarcerated are not denied a right to vote, which is the case in so many states in our country, in some states permanently deprived of the right to vote.”
“I think it’s a conversation we should have,” she said.
Of course it is. Felons are part of the Democrat base.
Harris later clarified her answer to say the most extreme crimes should received “serious punishment.”
As it is, the Biden-Harris ticket has a lock on the stupid people’s vote.
Photo: joshblake / E+ / Getty Images Plus
