Manufacturing reality kicks into gear
Kamala Harris is still a deeply flawed candidate, but your screen doesn't want you to know
The speed with which corporate media can change their tune is a thing to behold. As recently as this past weekend, both before the Biden bombshell and in the immediate aftermath, the media largely acknowledged what had long been the reality with Kamala Harris: that while she was a prime contender to replace Biden as Democratic nominee, there were grave misgivings in the party about her past political performance and her suitability to lead the party into the upcoming election.
Clips were played of AOC warning on social media that some Democrats wouldn’t support Harris even if they wanted Biden to drop out. Commentators freely discussed Harris’s missteps and gaffes in her brief time as a presidential candidate in 2020 and while Vice President, and her low polling numbers that were as bad as Biden’s.
She had fallen flat as a candidate despite sympathetic media coverage and had withdrawn from the race before a single primary vote had been cast. By that point she had fallen in the polls to Andrew Yang levels. There had been an inauthenticity to her and a sense of desperation when she branded Biden a racist for his past opposition to busing as a tool for school integration. Of all people, it was Tulsi Gabbard who had driven the nail in Harris’ coffin with a deft recounting of her shortcomings as a criminal prosecutor.
There had been a high percentage of turnover in her staff in the initial months of her vice presidency as she floundered, and she often lectured audiences in the tone and terminology of a kindergarten teacher when she wasn’t spouting indecipherable word salad or engaging in extended bouts of odd laughing at inappropriate times.
In short, prior to this week she had been viewed as a lightweight, barely up to the job. And being Vice President has never been considered a very demanding job, except when the President decides to hand you something useful and challenging to do. Biden had actually done so, putting her in charge of the border, and if she’d done anything at all about it, the results had been dismal.
Now, as of mid-week, that view of her — once so prevalent as to be almost unanimous — has, as if by the flick of a switch, been virtually banished as she has gradually been acknowledged as the only practical alternative to Biden.
The media know their role: they are full-throated advocates for whoever and whatever the favored regime of the day has decided it wants. They paint a picture for the public of the world that the regime wishes existed rather than the one that actually exists, hoping perceptions become reality.
But they need a catalyst for so abrupt an about-face. So, in this case they hung their hats on a poll that oversampled Democrats against Republicans to assert that, despite it all, Kamala Harris already lead Donald Trump in the presidential race. Then the major Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue claimed they raised over $200 million in the two days after Harris became the presumptive nominee.
New narrative: Activate!
Now that the reality-generation machine has kicked into full gear the demonstrable bald-faced lies about the past, more charitably known as “revisionist histories”, will be trotted out one-by-one. The first one was a doozy: the claim that Biden never made Harris “border czar”, despite numerous reputable publications reporting exactly that at the time. This claim apparently hung on the fact that the term is a colloquialism and not the actual title of an office.
Catchy themes are already being audience-tested, the more promising ones repeated ad nauseum to gauge how well they’ll stick — “It’s a prosecutor taking on a convicted felon!” This is the kind of stuff we’ll see endless examples of as the months progress.
But no form of media will have more impact than social media. On Monday, CNN’s veteran bullshitter Van Jones solemnly reported that “there’s something happening that’s hard to quantify” on TikTok regarding Harris, claiming her catalog of cringeworthy moments had been “remixed” by Gen Z users to transform them “from cringe to cool in 24 hours”.
Singer-songwriter Charli XCX declared on X (formerly Twitter), “kamala IS brat”, in reference to the title of the artist’s latest album. The Harris campaign quickly latched on, issuing chartreuse-colored content styled to match the album cover and proclaiming a “brat girl summer” to be at hand.
Part of this was predictable and understandable. Democrats had been so depressed and unmotivated for so long by their octogenarian former candidate that a comparatively youthful 59-year-old replacement was bound to generate excitement. It didn’t hurt that she also had impeccable identity politics credentials. The Democrats’ thirst for “firsts” is virtually unquenchable.
But I’m highly skeptical that this early enthusiasm, which feels very artificial and manufactured, will stand the test of time. Creative remixes that resonate with a relatively small demographic won’t suffice if Kamala Harris the 2024 presidential candidate performs anything like Kamala Harris the 2020 presidential candidate, or, for that matter, Kamala Harris the incumbent vice president.
A highly experienced and well-versed candidate who nonetheless occasionally gazes blankly into space or wanders off stage is, to my mind and to many others’, only marginally worse than a candidate who speaks to people about world affairs like this:
The true test will come if, as I’ve predicted, Biden is forced to leave office early and Harris becomes President prior to the election. Then the public will get to see what a full-term Harris presidency would look like. Whether that happens is likely to depend on whether it’s judged to be good strategy by the unholy alliance of Democratic Party mandarins, finance and arms industry operators, and Deep State insiders intent on preserving the corporate capture of government on their terms.
I think they’ll choose to take the gamble, betting that the level of gravitas conferred by merely holding office will outweigh the risk that she crashes and burns early. It could also be useful in limiting her time on the campaign trail, thereby lessening the opportunities she has to lapse into the sort of babble-speak she’s become known for when going too far off teleprompter.
It’s also very possible that Trump and his loyalists will play into his opponents’ hands by adopting a heavy handed approach with Harris that will seem misogynistic and overbearing. That didn’t hurt with Hillary Clinton, but she was already especially loathed by a large segment of the population, and the oldest Gen Z’ers, a generation for whom such tactics are particularly off-putting, were barely of voting age.
Regardless of how all that plays out, though, one thing is for certain: corporate and social media have chosen their candidate, and they’ll leave shame at the doorstep to prostitute themselves for the cause. They’re already pretending that they weren’t a key part of the effort to hide Biden’s decline, blaming the White House as the sole culprit mere weeks after they declared internet clips showing that very decline to be “cheap fakes”.
I have never been, and never will be, a Trump voter. But it doesn’t take a partisan to see that what Trump joked about at his 2016 Al Smith Charity Dinner roast of Hillary Clinton has already begun to repeat this year, just as it did in 2020:
I know Hillary met my campaign manager, and I got a chance to meet the people who are working so hard to get her elected. There they are, the heads of NBC, CNN, CBS, ABC. There is the New York Times right over there, and the Washington Post. They are working overtime.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.