As a member of the San Francisco media, I’ve been watching Kamala Harris since 2003 when she ran for District Attorney against the incumbent DA, Terrence Hallinan. First, she was accused of being tactless for running against the man who hired her as a deputy attorney several years earlier. Then, it was discovered she won by seriously violating campaign finance laws.
Even by San Francisco standards, Harris’s eight-years as DA pushed the progressive envelope. She protected illegal immigrant drug dealers from prison with her “smart on crime” initiative, expunging their criminal records and providing them job training. One person from the program went on to assault a woman, breaking her skull.
When an El Salvadorian MS-13 gang member murdered a father and his two sons, Harris adamantly refused to enforce California’s death penalty. The killer was in the US illegally and had been arrested for numerous gang-related offenses as a juvenile. I’ll never forget the call I received on my radio program from the grieving widow who lost her husband two boys. She was outraged by Harris’s inflexibility.
Curious, I discovered Kamala’s dad was a leftist professor emeritus at Stanford (specializing in post-Keynesian economics), and that he met her mom while they were student activists at the University of California-Berkeley during the hippy/counterculture movement. Harris, I figured, was cut from their radical cloth and gravitated to the judicial system with lofty goals to end alleged disparate outcomes, structural racism, and mass incarceration.
When running for California’s Attorney General, I heard Harris use an odd phrase she has employed many times since: “To see what could be, unburdened by what has been.” Kamala has since explained it’s a slogan her mother used to employ. While many have taken a stab at the meaning of this peculiar sentence, it’s possible it’s a catchphrase inspired by Karl Marx. For example, in his 1848 Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote: In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.
Marx perceived the past as representing of a system of slavery driven by capitalism, which he wanted to replace with communism.
I contend Kamala dreams of a similar world. I recently listened to her 2016 Senate victory speech presented to staff and supporters on election night. Her brief remarks make it vividly clear she has an ax to grind with America’s past and she is ready to see what could be.
“We know the stakes are high,” she said. “Do we retreat, or do we fight? I say we fight. And I intend to fight!”
In the span of eight fiery minutes, she used the term “fight” 33 times.
“I intend to fight for a state that has the largest number of immigrants, documented and undocumented, of any state in this country and do everything we can to bring them justice and dignity and fairness under the law and pass comprehensive immigration reform. Bring them out from under the shadows,” she exclaimed. “I intend to fight for Black Lives Matters…I intend to fight for a woman’s access to health care and reproductive health right. I intend to fight against those naysayers who suggest that there is no such thing as climate change…I intend to fight big oil, I intend to fight the science deniers…our ideals are at stake right now and we all have to fight!”
She closed her remarks stating, “I believe this is a pivotal moment in the history of our country. I believe we’re at an inflection point. I believe we are at a place that is similar to that place in time when my parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 60s and active in the civil rights movement…”
Appears the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
I encourage you to review the speech for yourself. May it inspire you to get out the vote and pray she doesn’t have the opportunity to repeat any portion of that speech on November 7.
Brian Sussman is the author of Climate Cult: Exposing and Defeating Their War on Life, Liberty, and Property.