The Harris Campaign Has Been A Total Disaster
But complacency is the worst possible response
It’s hard to fully grasp how bad the other side are at that most unlikely of things-honest politics.
Honest politics is the unlikeliest of all creations. It takes very particular circumstances to exist and in some ways expecting it is like believing that benevolent pixies live at the bottom of your garden or that Father Christmas exists.
Astonishingly though, the western world got closer to making it real than anyone else ever has. And it took centuries to get there. Centuries of reducing the power of the Church, the power of the nobility, the power of Kings. Centuries of expanding the rights of the People. Centuries of toil and protest, rebellion and revolution. Through all of which a uniquely Anglo-Saxon invention, the idea of innate individual liberty, more free than Greek democracy and more sacred than Enlightenment rationalism, existed in the way an exotic creature of the depths might come into existence.
Absurdly unlikely, but utterly natural. Astonishingly rare, and even more astonishingly precious.
The Founders of the USA recognized how rare and unlikely a thing ‘honest politics’ was, and recognized too that it required an environment of certain conditions in which, alone amongst all the circumstances of humanity and all the systems that had tried and failed, it could be born, mature and thrive.
They recognized that innate individual liberty was a sacred inheritance and a uniquely Anglo-Saxon invention when they spoke at the beginning of the Revolution of the rights they possessed as free-born Englishmen, and they recognized the same thing at the end of the Revolution when they made inalienable rights the thing that the entire Constitution and the entire shape of the political settlement of the new nation they had formed was designed to protect.
They knew even before the French Revolution that idealistic rationalism or righteous religious indignation could BOTH very quickly become barbaric insanity and that the fall of old tyrants could simply make way for newer and bloodier ones. Because that lesson was there in the events of English history. It was already there in the way that a Parliament which rebelled against the excesses of the King soon disgusted even its greatest General with its own corruption and vice. There was not a single Founder ignorant of Cromwell’s scathing address to the Rump Parliament. Nor were there many Revolutionary era Americans (Loyalist or Revolutionary) who would have been unaware of Cromwell’s excesses or those of the short lived English Republic between Civil War victory and the Restoration.
The whole point of the Constitution was two fold, two aims which are in reality the same aim. The first was to enshrine and protect the innate and inalienable liberty of the individual. The second was to map out a system of checks and balances preventing too much accumulation of power in any particular hands or in any particular group. This was how you defended citizens AND built a nation.
And it was how you tried to prevent new tyrants taking away sacred rights.
All of it was built on recognizing the sheer unlikeliness of success in this endeavor, and of how the worst instincts of humanity have a certain degree of entropy on their side and advantages (in offering rewards for the abuse of power) that many men (and women too) would succumb to.
Only a virtuous people can preserve the Republic.
Roman history too had given that lesson.
Honest politics is such an unlikely combination that it requires centuries to achieve and a very careful balancing act to maintain (one devised by very brilliant minds) together with a unified People possessed of strong moral features and shared cultural assumptions (and desires).
Where power accumulates to the extent that inalienable rights don’t exist or can be ignored when it suits the powerful, there can be no honesty either because some men are masters who can do as they please and others are serfs who must suffer without limit. A master does not feel he owes truth to a serf, and a serf does not feel that he can insist on it. Neither side in this is likely to be honest. The master lies to preserve his power and the serf lies to preserve his life. The system then exists to limit the hold on power to the existing regime, rather than the system existing to limit the amount of power any regime may claim.
That is when, acknowledged or unacknowledged as such, and whatever other name it gives itself, your system is a tyranny.
And this was a situation openly reached when the true result of the 2020 election was overturned. Everything since has merely been the exercise of power one should expect and anticipate from an illegally established government that broke the Constitution to steal an election, lied about everything, and was supported by every major institution in doing so.
I said at the start that the Harris campaign has been extraordinarily bad at honest politics. But what do I mean by this, and what do I mean by honest politics-is this more than an idealistic phrase?
Well, let’s look at what the campaign has actually done.
They began by an obvious palace coup in which the democratically supported candidate was ousted. Whilst Biden had no real legitimacy as President (having been installed by fraud and theft, and having governed as the figurehead puppet of the people who organised that) he did have legitimacy as a 2024 candidate. There was a real process to confirm him as such (although of course that too was subject to the corruption the Democrat Party could not now stop deploying even if they wanted to).
Still, even though totally corrupt practices were used to prevent a fair, level playing field Kennedy or similar challenge for candidacy, Biden did get Democrat voters to vote for him as the nominee.
Kamala never had a single vote from anyone.
She was installed and anointed in a backroom Party hierarchy coup that makes the selection of a Borgia Pope in Renaissance Italy look like a democratic process. Everyone knows that Biden was forced, very reluctantly, to step down. It’s likely he knew absolutely nothing of his own first announcement of doing so, until the Party heavyweights in the coup made it clear to him and his family that it was a done deal and impossible to resist.
In their wisdom, the Party plotters (pressured by the Black Democrat caucus) then decided that no challenge to Kamala’s ascension could occur.
What we are told then happened was a Kamala bounce or a Kamala surge where everyone was delighted to have the Vice President switch to become the 2024 candidate instead of the ‘President’. Perhaps part of this was real. There is no doubt that Biden’s performances had grown increasingly awful and impossible to cover for, and so some relief at a ‘fresh start’ must have been there.
But I suspect this was a bounce strictly limited to one group only-fanatical Democrat voters who were going to vote for them no matter what anyway. It wasn’t a bounce that ever applied to undecided and independent voters or even to wavering fringe and historic voters. All of those had happened to notice the inconvenient fact that Kamala was already Vice President and had been for the whole Biden administration.
In other words the campaign started with a couple of massive lies that can’t ever really be sold except to people you have already thoroughly brainwashed or people who rape kids and you have that on film. Those are the only people who are going to buy, and would ever have brought, these two central lies which the Kamala campaign simply cannot extricate themselves from:
I am a fresh start who was in power for the last 3.5 years.
I am saving Democracy and was installed by a palace coup with nobody else getting a say.
You cannot possibly resolve or escape those fundamental contradictions. Even people who talk about ‘the female penis’ will have a niggling sense of doubt about these two things.
Sure they have been conditioning Democrat voters for years to be slavish Pod People riddled with cognitive dissonance and capable of exceptionally loyal forms of delusion, but even so….these contradictions are so glaring, so basic, and so re-emphasized by the campaign itself as it kept pressing its idiotic tropes of Year Zero Beginnings and Trump is Literally Hitler that every move the campaign made could not help but remind people that 1. Kamala was knee deep in every Biden failure and 2. Kamala’s own elevation wasn’t in the least bit democratic.
For voters with a brain, that is anyone who was not going to vote Democrat no matter what, Kamala was a terrible, terrible pick. People already knew she was a word salad idiot. People already knew that 90% of her own staff had desperately run away to work elsewhere in the administration because she is an unbearably stupid, arrogant and unpleasant bitch. People knew that she climbed to the top on her hands and knees with a cock in her mouth. People already knew she was the Border Tsar when the border was thrown open.
And you didn’t even have to be Republican to know these things. Democrats knew that the Biden administration was on course to lose and polling in the toilet, which is precisely why they ousted Biden. But somehow they thought that licking her feet would make Kamala (there all along) clean of it? They thought they could simultaneously sell her as the experienced VP ready to step up a level AND the totally fresh innocent not at all connected to the period in which she was VP?
How did they think that would fly, exactly?
Well, they thought it could be sold the way they sell anything that’s ruinous and stupid. By a psy-ops campaign and a media blitz of Headlines From Another Reality. That’s what the Democrat Convention was. That’s what the absurd Kamala as the Statue of Liberty stuff was, the Cat Ladies and White Dudes For Kamala stuff, and of course what the mandated Stalinist JOY was too.
They really are so bad at honest politics that they think sticking an airbrushed picture of her with 15 years taken off looking borderline hot but thoughtfully serious on the cover of Time makes a difference. One of the drawbacks of controlling a Shill Media for so long is not realizing that you are now paying people who nobody else listens to. Time magazine, or The Atlantic, or any of the places that went into JOY MODE on demand are no longer capable of swinging a single vote. Everyone they can offer you is someone you already own.
When you pay an Atlantic or Bloomberg or Washington Post journo to write delusional nonsense about how great you are, you get his or her vote and that’s about it. As Trump joked about White Guys For Harris, his wife and her lover are voting for Trump.
Who the hell is still reading The New Yorker? The people who work there. Maybe a CIA guy who got moved from Facebook for masturbating all day.
Shills deliver themselves, and nobody else. Smarter independents are now getting as sickened by it and as turned off by it as MAGA voters are. It’s proof of dominant power in that THE MESSAGE can be spread everywhere and everyone has to see it…but most people aren’t and won’t be paying to see it and most people are sick to death of it being rammed down their throats.
The JOY was an artificial creation of the shills, and laughable to anyone who wasn’t already in that Pod Person category of the hopelessly brainwashed…who are fewer in number than anyone suspects.
All of the initial Kamala bounce was fake news, except maybe a tiny little dribble of relief that Biden was effectively gone, soon replaced by a Jesus Christ she’s even worse!
It’s hard to fully express how bad the campaign and the performance of Harris herself has been since then.
First, it’s done the classic thing that all bad campaigns and incompetent people do. It’s made shitty choices, then had to backtrack or reverse them.
Remember all the food price control and rent price control stuff at the beginning? Marxist policies that lead to starvation and homelessness (two things Democrats were pretty good at supplying already). Those had to be walked back on because the campaign was presenting the most left wing Senator in the US (ranked as such on voting record between 2017-2021 by GovTrack and DW-NOMINATE ) as a moderate conciliator.
Not only were these policies awful, they torpedoed the entire ‘I’m the moderate, Trump is the extremist’ argument and reminded everyone that this woman is an economic Marxist.
Exactly what the campaign was trying to disguise.
Then we have the Bunker strategy where for a long period she refused to give interviews. This was a carbon copy of Biden’s 2020 strategy but again following this immediately torpedoed one of the central claims of her campaign. The whole point was supposed to be that she was better than Biden, not the same. The whole strategic point of the palace coup was supposed to be about getting rid of a person who fucked up every interview or appearance (because he’s senile and wasn’t very bright to begin with) so you could get someone in who looks better, sounds better, and can make appearances without every one of them becoming a disaster.
Hiding from interviews said I know I’m just as shit as Joe, and like Joe I’m just going to dodge the stuff Presidents are expected to do.
A President who can’t or won’t do interviews is like a plumber who is scared of drains. You can’t get away with it. That’s the goddamn job. What the fuck are they doing running for the Presidency? The President is the Face of the US nation and system. Picking someone who hides in a bunker is like hiring a hooker who won’t touch. Nobody is satisfied with that.
AND they were trying to do it a second time. Biden got away with the Bunker Strategy because he was old, had some excuses based on age ready, still did a few appearances, and people kinda realized his absence gradually and expected it to be part of and a partial explanation of his loss (which of course, fraud avoided). It’s much harder to ‘spring a bunker’ on people who have seen that cowardice before. It’s impossible when you are simultaneously being described as Wonder Woman and a huge improvement on Joe.
People naturally ask ‘if she’s so great, why isn’t she doing interviews and showing us that?
So again the campaign was contradicting itself. It was saying she’s so amazing we are going to hide her from you. Even Democrats couldn’t mentally square that line. Because of that, they were forced to change approach again, buckle in to the pressure, and start making appearances.
All of which have been train wrecks.
But she’s Wonder Woman. They had already replaced one failed candidate and sold this one as the Woke Lady Jesus. Once you do that, you’re trapped with that assessment. You have to keep that lie going.
So every terrible appearance has to be described as a triumph, no matter how bad it goes. Which means you have no excuse not to do another one. Which means you then face a series of self inflicted exposures and reminders that your candidate is actually stupid but you keep calling her smart, nasty but you keep calling her nice, arrogant but you keep calling her modest, Marxist but you insist she’s moderate.
Their own lies force them to keep exposing themselves to further ridicule and pushing them towards strategies that make it impossible to actually disguise the obvious flaws and weaknesses of their candidate.
The equivalent would be if the Trump campaign tried to sell him as a poverty stricken guy who lacks confidence and has struggled with self-esteem issues. It’s not going to sell even to people on your side, and the people selling it just make it even more obvious that they are liars.
Everyone shilling for the Harris contradictions just looks like a bigger shill.
But the thing is they haven’t just done this with Harris. This is the exact same thing they have done with Tim Putz.
They take a creepy weirdo and get him to call other people weird. They focus attention to his own weakness. JD Vance was never going to be ‘the weird one’ to most people comparing him with Putz. Only the most delusional Democrat fanatics would buy that. They make it worse by pretending this guy is a rugged outdoorsman when physically he’s Comic Store Guy from the Simpsons. They put a rifle in his hands and film him hunting, when he looks like he spends more time hunting small boys than anything else. At best, he hunts down a specific flavor of M&M’s. They give him a shotgun and he looks clueless.
This guy was somehow in the Army and looks like he’s never even seen a gun of any kind before. Maybe he could hold a toy pistol OK while dancing to YMCA, but that’s it.
They took Elmer Fudd and pretended they were showing you Conan the Barbarian.
Inevitably, rumors now suggest they picked an actual pedophile. That’s their version of All American Hero and their version of Perfectly Normal Father Figure.
They didn’t have to engineer that mess. They didn’t have to pick an obvious Putz for VP nominee. They didn’t have to try and sell him as something he plainly isn’t, just as he didn’t have to lie about his rank and behave (at best) inappropriately with pupils. It’s all self-created disaster that they try and sell as triumph.
And of course both Harris and Putz fail in debates and interviews. 60 Minutes. The debate against Trump. Fox News. The debate against Vance. Even the cringe worthy heavily assisted performances like that first joint interview. They come across as what they are-limited but entitled, nervous but arrogant, stupid but smug, deeply, deeply strange people who have been picked as non threatening puppets by those actually in power.
More than that, they and their Party have spectacularly failed national tests during the election. They have shown that they don’t care when Americans drown and that their priorities are still elsewhere when American die. The awful response to Helene was not the first time its been made clear that the US government under Democrats doesn’t care about US citizens dying and suffering, but it was perhaps the most shockingly obvious given that it occurred so close to the election.
One might even think that, for some reason, these people don’t even care about even just looking good. As if nothing they do, or fail to do, impacts their chances of being ‘elected’.
So what is honest politics?
It’s not even 100% total objectivity. It’s not solely factual. It’s not even politics without bias, or without spin and some degree of propaganda. Its politics where power is not illegally, unjustly, and unconstitutionally concentrated to determine the result. Its politics where candidates sink or swim by genuine strengths without nipping in and out of speed boats in an alleged swimming contest. Its one where even friendly media abide by some degrees of objectivity at least to the extent of us all sharing the same reality. It’s one where electoral fraud and assassination attempts and lawfare aren’t factors in the result, and where key facts aren’t buried before the vote or electoral fraud denied after electoral fraud tips the result.
You can have efforts to present your candidate as well as you can and its still honest politics.
You can’t pretend a debate with moderators attacking and fact checking one person and not the other is a real debate.
You can spend millions on promoting your candidate and there’s still some honesty in that, but you can’t spend millions controlling the electoral process itself and claim that’s honest too.
There are really only two types of politics in any system with votes. There is honest politics where some kind of rules apply evenly, and there is machine politics where everything is rigged and dishonest. The first provides the only democracy that matters, and the second provides nothing but forms of tyranny.
A Party that didn’t get into power by the first will of course use the second to retain power. They have encouraged assassination. They have put in place rules trying to make the detection and prevention of fraud illegal. Some of the emergency measures excused by COVID aren’t around anymore, but they have been busily ‘fortifying the election’ again. Ballots have again been sent out that exceed the number of legitimate voters. Dominion machines are still in place.
All the conditions and means of fraud are still there. Plus there is legislative change to allow the use of the military against US citizens. That puts weapons in their hands ready to crush reaction to another stolen victory.
The reason Democrats are so bad at honest politics is because they are so good at machine politics. They don’t know how to win honestly because they haven’t needed to know that for a long time.
The cheat who suffers no consequence cheats again.
This time they have overplayed their hand. The more egregious the fraud and corruption, the more people wake up and fight back. The worse the crap candidate is, the greater the distinction between them and the truly good candidate. I have prayed all along that God shines a light on the dark places and reveals people for who they truly are. So far, my prayers are being answered.
It may just be that the Democrats know they can "win" even if they lose big time; if so, then it matters not that they have a laughing hyena as POTUS. She or whoever would be a puppet anyway; it's who pulls the strings that matters, not what is on the end of the strings.
I have a horrible sinking feeling that however big Trump wins, he will lose.
RIP the USA.