The Candidate Who Isn't There
The Democrat Nominee Is a Mercurial Chameleon With No Discernable Policy Platform
A truly remarkable event occurred on July 21st, when Joe Biden—seemingly to his own surprise—announced that he would no longer be seeking reelection.
Without hesitation or so much as a single critical thought, the very same talking heads, pundits, and internet influencers who had been propping up Biden until the very moment he backed out were suddenly heaping praise and throwing their support behind Kamala Harris, the democrat establishment’s heir apparent.
Harris, despite the fact that she never campaigned or received a single vote, amassed enough pledged delegates after Biden’s withdrawal to secure the nomination, virtually uncontested.
As the DNC’s industrious zoomer mouthpiece Harry Sisson put it on a recent CNN spot, “It feels like this energy has been injected into the Democratic party…”
But where was all of this energy in 2020, when Kamala actually had to campaign without the full weight of the entire Democrat establishment behind her?
If you recall, at one point she ended up polling at 3%, landing in 6th place behind Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren and even Bloomberg; so what has changed between then and now to merit this sudden excitement? Was it the stellar job she did as Vice President? Is it because she is such a captivating orator? Or is it the combination of an artificial signal boost coupled with a deeply ingrained hatred of Donald Trump in the hearts of many Democrat partisans?
Garden variety liberals and corporate media figures continue to swoon for Kamala for some unapparent reason; besides spamming trite bromides regarding abortion and LGBTQ+ issues, she really hasn’t informed the American people what a Harris presidency would look like.
It’s a campaign based on nothing, and they seem confident that her path to victory will be paved by people whose brains are just as empty as hers.
We are just three months away from one of the most significant elections in our lifetime, and Kamala has not made any spontaneous or unscripted statements or actions. This is evident from her clearly-rehearsed and manufactured phone conversations with Biden and the Obamas, as well as her campaign speeches that lack substance and are word for word identical in every state.
Similar to Joe Biden in 2020, she has so far refused to participate in interviews or provide remarks regarding her beliefs on any of the numerous domestic and foreign crises currently underway.
What we have heard a lot about is how many demographic “firsts” she represents, and we’ll be hearing a lot of that these next few months. I suppose it’s worth at least noting her gender and ethnicity, but that should probably be secondary to what she thinks and believes and what she would seek to do with the presidency, don’t you think?
There is a very palpable lack of any journalists complaining or requesting publicly that she sit down with them for an interview. X is literally the public square, and if these hacks in the media, with all of their connections, cared to actually practice journalism, they would be trying to land that interview. This is how you know that the corporate media is populated with trained propagandists and political operatives.
Glenn Greenwald’s recent critique of CNN’s coverage of Harris’s campaign could really be applied to every major network’s response to Kamala’s ascension.
Ok. Suppose she’s just too busy to commit to any interviews, you would think that one could at least find talk of policy on her campaign website, right? Well no, actually … instead of anything substantive we are given inspiring platitudes like “Together, we can win this!”
There’s also a brief biography and some merchandise, but noticeably missing is literally even the slightest mention of politics.
Maybe they're just still constructing that part of the website? I suppose time will tell.
So despite the lack of any discernible policy platform—fueled by the media’s misdirection and general lack of interest in pressing her on these questions—Kamala has been experiencing a surge in the polls. Whether this is accurate or inflated is, as always, a point of contention between partisans.
As per SCNR:
In a notable turn of events, Vice President Kamala Harris has now overtaken former President Donald Trump in both national and Electoral College polling, signaling the potential for her to win this year’s presidential election.
This dramatic shift marks a complete reversal from recent months, during which Harris consistently trailed Trump in hypothetical head-to-head matchups and as the veep on a ticket with President Joe Biden.
Harris now holds a roughly two-point lead over Trump in national polling, according to Race to the White House, a top election forecaster, which called the most races correctly during the 2022 election cycle.
There is one way in which I could see the sudden spike in support for Kamala having SOME truth to it; one of the main reasons Biden lost favor with a significant portion of the left was his ceaseless devotion to funding Israel’s war efforts while refusing to even attempt to mitigate what most of the world sees as excessive aggression.
Kamala, after having been interrupted by protestors during her campaign speech in Michigan, paid some hollow lip service to reaching a ceasefire agreement.
The statement was about as inauthentic as anything that Kamala Harris has ever said, and certainly the comment section on this clip was not impressed.
Now, this hollow political gesture might placate those on the left who only became sympathetic to Palestine because of identity politics, but it isn’t going to fool the protestors whose friends and family are being raped and bombed by the IDF. Unfortunately, the identity politics camp makes up a much larger percentage of the movement, and this feigning support for a ceasefire could be enough to sway some of them.
This presents a major problem for many liberals, who have been lying to themselves and to their followers by trying to pretend that Kamala has different views than Biden when it comes to supporting and financing Israel. There is, of course, no evidence to suggest that this is the case, and the evidence suggesting that a Kamala Harris administration will be more of the same in that regard, and in pretty much every other way, is mounting by the day.
The most interesting part about these liberal influencers who are trying to live in both worlds—that is the pro-Palestine world and the Democrat establishment world—are actually the ones who, in their desperate attempts to contort the truth to keep their outlook from crumbling, have actually provoked the first official statement from anyone on behalf of Harris’s campaign.
We can thank Emma Vigeland, the co-host of a transcendentally cringe and unabashedly pro-DNC YouTube show called “The Majority Report,” who tweeted out the following fabrication:
This tweet likely brought some kind of comfort or solace to those liberal armchair political experts who were torn between their desire to get Instagram pics of themselves at pro-Palestine demonstrations and the urge to throw their full-throated support behind Kamala Harris.
The problem is that this solace is based on an outright lie, as everything about this tweet is completely invented.
Kamala Harris has never suggested or even passively indicated that she was open to or considering an arms embargo. Emma Vigeland’s public display of mental gymnastics, whether intentionally or otherwise, further deceived already confused leftists who were having trouble reconciling why this candidate they’ve been told was so great was directing scorn at protestors.
Aside from the contingent of American, 1st-world liberals who contextualize reality by comparing it to movies, anime and video games, no one with even the most modest amount of political savvy believed for a millisecond that Kamala was actually considering this.
These unfortunate leftists were then promptly doused with the cold water of reality by Harris’s national security advisor Phil Gordan:
It’s hard to fathom how little political insight somebody must have to believe that Harris would actually publicly endorse something as polemical, controversial and radical as an arms embargo against Israel.
Can you imagine what would happen if she announced an arms embargo? It’s actually inconceivable to me.
Kamala has never once in her entire career challenged any power center in American society, and everything she actually has done was done at the behest of those power centers. What could a rational person point to in her political history to suggest that Kamala would suddenly muster the gumption and moral fiber it’d take to oppose power centers as hulking and imposing as AIPAC and the Democrat establishment?
To illustrate my point, consider her handling of the widespread Catholic priest-child sex abuse scandal in San Francisco from the early 2000s.
A willingness to do the bidding of the various power centers in our society is the defining quality of a deep-state politician, and Kamala has repeatedly displayed such a willingness, even an eagerness to do so.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco is a very powerful institution in the context of Bay Area politics, and it just so happened that they made sizable contributions to Harris’s 2003 campaign for San Francisco DA, knowing full well that the previous District Attorney Terrence Hallinan was preparing to release all of the evidence he’d gathered on their decades of sexual assault to the public.
All she had to do was nothing, to allow the process to finish playing out and finally give some kind of justice to the victims who had been fighting to have this information made public for years; but she squashed it. Like any corrupt politician worth their salt, she carried out a favor for her donor, and even claimed, insultingly, that she did it to protect victims privacy.
So, back to trying to figure out WTF Kamala stands for.
I’ve asked in left-liberal groups, forums and message boards across the internet, “What part of Kamala’s policy platform are you guys most looking forward to!?” and I’ve gotten a variety of answers, some trite statements about her gender and the oft repeated “women’s reproductive rights” spiel, but no one made the observation that she really doesn’t have a radically new and personalized policy platform; it’s basically Biden administration 2.0.
I decided to push a little harder and ask if anyone thought it was weird that her website was noticeably missing any mention of what she would do with the presidency, to which I was promptly met with hostility.
Somebody actually sent me this link from some third party website that catalogs things politicians have said throughout their careers. So I looked into it, and beyond the fact that many of the things cataloged there span the entirety of her career, I found there are a number of things she previously endorsed that she has since backpedaled on.
Below is the headline from an article CNN published July 30, 2024.
Recalibrate is a nice way of saying “completely abandoned her previous positions.”
I’ll concede that people change, but in this case, I have a sneaking suspicion that Kamala doesn’t actually believe in anything; she just does what the democrat operatives running her career tell her to do. It makes you wonder if the things she’s flipped on from the last election cycle were ever on the table to begin with.
The article goes on to describe some of the issues she’s “recalibrated” her position on; they include Single-payer health care, a fracking ban, abolishing ICE and defunding the police. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if she has had a well-thought-out change of heart, or if she is simply doing what she is told like a good puppet.
Conversely, if you look at Donald Trump’s positions over the last 8 years, they haven’t really changed. With Trump, we actually know what we’re going to get because he has been president before, and because he has published his platform in the form of Agenda 47, which, btw, if you haven’t read through yet, I highly encourage you to.
There are some pretty remarkable and almost fantastical ideas mentioned there, including “promoting the development of "vertical takeoff-and-landing vehicles"“ which... what the hell does that mean?
Kamala has only been in Washington DC for a relatively short period of time. just four short years ago she was a California State politician, her time in the Federal Government has been brief, and it is still unclear exactly what she has done in that time. She doesn’t communicate anything that isn’t scripted or written on her behalf, and her beliefs tend to change rapidly from year to year.
Kamala Harris is only the latest in a series of masks worn by an international deep state hell-bent on destroying this country.
Donald Trump needs to win this year. Not just because I want to see some “vertical take-off and landing” craft, but because America will fall if he doesn’t.
I wrote the proceeding portion of this article in the weeks following Kamala’s securement of the Democrat Party’s nomination, and since then, there have been some developments worth noting.
We still have yet to really hear from the horse’s mouth what Kamala’s goals are, but we can probably safely say that they are exactly the same as Joe Biden’s. It’s a safe assumption even without any proof, but in this case, we actually have all the proof that we need.
Here is the document they finally released outlining the Democrat platform: ‘24 Democratic Party Platform.
The problem is that this document was very clearly drawn up with a second Biden term in mind, as they refer to Biden as the presidential candidate all throughout the text. In fact, there are nearly 300 instances of “Biden” in the document compared to 32 instances of “Harris.”
At the very least, this suggests what was already obvious: that whichever Democrat sits in the Oval Office is irrelevant to the ruling class; they are all hollow vessels for the establishment. It also suggests laziness and arrogance; it wouldn't have taken long to edit this document, but they're confident that their voters won't read it, and that the few journalists who will won't criticize them.
There are many great journalists out there who requested press credentials for the DNC; I personally know of one center-left journalist of quality who is pigeonholed as conservative because he’s defended and reported fairly on Trump, he requested press credentials, and the DNC came back with an offer of two press passes for $200,000 a piece! Can you believe that?
Of course, propaganda artists like Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki get in free; but any real journalists who might ask substantive or adversarial questions can only attend if they are willing to part with 6 figures.
And then there was this soul-cringing display:
No real journalists are able to cover the event and conduct interviews because a small army of teenage influencers were bussed in to take their place. Awesome.
The lines at the DNC were a complete logistical disaster, with even Democrat operatives like Paul Begela, Charlotte Clymer and Ted Deutch forced to sit in line and fend of independent journalists who ask real questions by invoking exclusivity deals with CNN (see the video below). But again, it’s fortunate that the horde of testosterone-deficient teens were able to secure their rightful place in the DNC.
Another noteworthy event was the symbolic ascension of New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from a “radical” rabblerouser to a refined Democrat establishment power player. AOC delivered a speech that left all Democrats, from moderate and established members to the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party, filled with unabashed delight.
It’s possible that another SubStack someday is warranted regarding AOC's gradual transition from posturing as the anti-establishment Left to her current trajectory of becoming Nancy Pelosi 2.0, but suffice to say, she is now being seen as a rising star in the establishment. The same career democrats who would once denounce her—whether genuinely or not—are now cheering her.
The real reason I even bring her up is because AOC told a significant falsehood as one of the centerpieces of her speech. She claimed that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza,” which you shouldn’t need me to tell you is a complete lie. There isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that this is the case, and even on its face, it sounds completely absurd. First of all, nothing she’s done in the last 4 years suggests that she’s ever “worked tirelessly” on anything, let alone something so potentially incendiary to her campaign as opposing the Israel Lobby.
The urgency of rent checks and groceries and prescriptions. She is as committed to our reproductive and civil rights, and she is taking on corporate greed. [Applause] And she is working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and bringing hostages home.
The entire sentence could not have been more offensive to the truth. For the last five weeks, ever since a shadowy cabal of Democrat elites forced the ouster of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris has been focused on one thing and one thing only: winning this election.
People aren’t buying it. During the Convention’s symbolic roll call on Tuesday, 44 delegates voted "present" instead of casting their vote for Kamala Harris. These were largely members of the “Uncommitted” movement. Even though the operatives and speakers at the DNC are completely in lock-step, the greater voter base is still fractured, which is a problem you cannot simply ignore.
And then there’s the problem mentioned all throughout this piece—that Kamala Harris’s campaign is a vacuous joke. Even corporate news personnel are arguing about how remarkably little she has done in the last 4 years:
The reason we delayed this post is because we were concerned that Harris’s speech at the DNC might render the contents of this article obsolete—that she would finally announce substantive policy initiatives or how she plans to radically pivot from the current tragic trajectory of the Biden administration.
Well, the speech came and went, and we still have absolutely no idea what would change should Kamala become the empty suit in office.
First of all, the whole DNC felt like a production, as if the most capable assets from Hollywood and the bowels of the CIA joined forces to orchestrate an event that had a grotesque overabundance of manufactured energy. Her speech was about as vapid as it gets. It was a masterclass in platitudes that never at any point rendered anything of substance.
Honestly, there’s really not a whole lot else to say about it. What IS news, however, was RFK Jr’s endorsement of Trump. That speech had more actual policy talk than both the RNC and DNC combined, which wasn’t exactly a difficult feat. If he's serious about Trump letting him end the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, that's HUGE, but is also a topic for another day.
Nothing more exemplifies the fact that politics is a fabricated religion than Kamala Harris. Six weeks ago, no one would have presumed that she was particularly noteworthy; however, she is now a phenomenon, a celebrity, and a source of cheer.
These individuals are members of a sect, and they revere the machine.
Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.
If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of Ryan’s work for free at the Post-Liberal.
Badlands Media will always put out our content for free, but you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Help our collective of citizen journalists take back the narrative from the MSM. We are the news now.
There is really only one difference between Harris and Biden:
-- Biden lost his brain as he went senile.
-- Harris never had a usable brain to begin with.
So now they're pretty much even. The change was for some other reason...
It's just the "as long as it isn't Trump" bandwagon. Try to spead the Intercept story around. Can't hurt.