Kamala Harris Is an Avatar Created by the Press

This isn't a campaign, it's a media-fueled pageant.

Kamala Harris declined a sit-down interview with Time, but the magazine still ran with this cover.

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I doubt that I’m alone when I say that the past month has been disorienting, and, quite frankly, dispiriting. We’re living in a deeply artificial zone of political unreality, a funhouse bizarro universe of distortion driven by a vertical messaging apparatus made possible by progressive control of America’s key institutions.

And, as usual, it is the mainstream media, which is entrusted with sense-making and truth-telling, that’s playing a fundamental role in this distortion. It’s beyond my power to convey the disdain I have for these people. Just when I think I couldn’t possibly despise them any more than I already do, they prove me wrong.

Consider the stunning examples of malpractice we’ve witnessed of late.

At the start of this year, the press spent months furiously working with the Biden administration to conceal the president’s cognitive decline. Over and over again our self-styled guardians of democracy lied to the public with genuine conspiratorial malice about one of the most consequential facts in American life at a time of great instability in the world, insisting that questioning Biden’s cognitive capacity was immoral and wrong, and that anyone who doubted the president’s ability to serve another four years had been duped by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

When the cover-up failed due to Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27th, a tidal wave of negative coverage was unleashed and even featured some of the same examples of mental decline that just weeks earlier had been dismissed as “cheap fakes.” This sudden shift to adversarial reporting against the Biden administration wasn’t because the press had “discovered” the truth of a major story it had previously derided as right-wing treachery. No, it was because the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects had reached rock bottom, and the only way to salvage Team Blue’s chances in November was to essentially orchestrate a soft coup with Democratic operatives and get Biden off the ticket.¹

Well, this plan obviously succeeded. And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as Biden dropped out of the race, questions about his cognitive health ceased. Indeed, the current president is hardly mentioned at all these days, unless it’s as part of “the fulfillment of the bargain that was implicitly offered to Biden by his fellow Democrats — that by bowing out he would trade the shadow of scandal for the halo of self-sacrifice and coast through the final days as his party’s Cincinnatus, nobly returning to the plow,” in the words of Ross Douthat. Never mind that the President of the United States is non compos mentis; never mind that it’s utterly absurd to believe that the man occupying the Oval Office is too feeble to run for reelection but fit to serve another six months. The political conundrum has been solved, and so the subject that dominated news coverage for weeks suddenly isn’t a story anymore.

Sitting President of the United States spending the day at the beach, August 10, 2024. Four-day weekend. Dropped out of the race by tweet. No explanation given. Barely been seen since. Schedule is a joke. Occupies his office only in the technical sense of physical corporeality. Media has no follow-up questions. | Reuters

The mainstream media has basically written Joe Biden out of the entire political story of the 2024 election, because they know exploring the nonsensical reality that the man is still commander in chief will only harm the Democratic Party’s fortunes. And so now that Operation Put Down Joe Like Old Yeller has concluded, newsrooms have shifted to…

Operation Deify Kamala Harris

If you were still under the impression that what passes for “journalism” in this country has anything to do with telling the truth or holding power accountable, then surely the past few weeks have forever opened your eyes. It couldn’t be more obvious that “the press has a team, and it intends to play for it,” as Charles Cooke put it.

Our media patricians spent not even a second questioning the legitimacy of the unprecedented, cavalier transfer of power that took place a few weeks ago, in which Kamala Harris, who owes her entire political ascendancy to party elites as opposed to voters,² was anointed by an 88-word tweet. Instead, essentially the entire mainstream media has opted to abandon any remaining vestige of impartiality and credibility in the service of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee,³ shielding her from scrutiny by way of pop mythology and the thoughtless, revolting adulation that accompanies it and working in overdrive to turn the most unpopular Vice President in American history — whom Democratic primary voters previously rejected in historic fashion — into Barack Obama 2.0.

Blue-blood presstitutes now see their job as electing Harris, not educating voters about what she would do as president, and have engaged in selective editorial amnesia, gaslighting, and memory-holing so that the new Democratic candidate, who is the very definition of a progressive maximalist and vindictive culture war cop, can wash her hands of everything she’s said and done over the past seven years and present herself as a born-again moderate. There have been countless Kamala policy flip-flops announced via random campaign officials rather than the newly coronated Qween herself. It’s gotten to the point where even correct characterizations of her previous stances have been deemed ex post facto illegitimate, with outlets reframing Trump/Vance attempts to highlight these policy positions of just a few years ago as “accusations.”

“It was all an affectation!” say the Kamala Harris supporters defending her decision to jettison the far-left progressive persona she’s cultivated over the course of her career in national politics. As if this doesn’t reveal that Pantsuit Pericles is nothing more than a hollow vessel of no particular note or value in and of herself save as a symbol, someone who will adopt whatever positions are convenient to her at any given moment, who believes in nothing, whose “vision” for America is simply whatever will get her elected—that, or Kamala Harris is engaged in calculated deception; she knows her vision for the country is unpopular and likely to result in defeat at the ballot box, and so she’s “reversing” for the general election while fully intending to impose her true agenda and continue shifting the Overton Window to the Left once safely in office.

Kamala being presented as a blank slate candidate drives home the fact that much of her campaign’s “success” thus far derives from the extraordinary circumstances that led to her becoming the presumptive nominee. She did not have to secure the nomination, which is supposed to be a major accomplishment. All her positions would have been litigated, her phoniness seized on by opponents in a contested nomination battle. By fast-forwarding past the primaries and caucuses, the Qween simply ascended and jumped right into the race with Trump—which is why the press is so committed to her and acting as though she’s some unstoppable political phenomenon rather than a cardboard cutout of a politician who will be even easier to control than Biden, allowing the presidency to be further subsumed by the administrative state so that the executive branch remains unaccountable.

Yes, it’s often remarked that Republicans have been running against both Democrats and “the media” for decades, but the coordination among an array of cultural and journalistic institutions to ensure Kamala Harris gets elected president by retroactively conditioning voters into believing her unpopularity was a figment of their imaginations has been so shameless that it boggles the mind. Even her biggest vulnerabilities are being reframed as “strengths.” Harris isn’t inauthentic, says ABC News, she simply uses “code-switching,” which is a polite way of describing a person who overhauls her whole demeanor depending on the audience—“one of the most effective communication tools that politicians of color use to wield influence and gain power in venues where they have historically not had it.” And Harris rocking the explicative ability of a toothless toddler is actually a good thing, according to the The New York Times, because she now “presides over a post-coherence landscape, one where her occasionally meandering phrasing feels refreshingly low stakes.”

It’s now been 23 days since Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the top of the Democratic ticket. She’s done zero press conferences, answered zero adversarial questions, committed to only one of the three debates that Trump agreed to attend, and said she’ll do a single interview at some point this month.⁴ Her website still has no policy positions on it. And she’s reading the same script off a teleprompter at rallies.

Why? Because Kamala knows she can get away with it. Every single strategic decision of this campaign so far, and every decision from here on out, is premised upon the assumption that the mainstream media will brazenly run interference for her. Indeed, Politico reported today that Democrats are so confident the media will do all the heavy lifting⁵ this election that they’re just openly stating there’s no need for their presidential candidate to even have policy proposals. Meanwhile, our noble scribes know that quizzing Harris closely about her agenda risks helping Trump, and so they’ve decided to make the case against a presidential candidate answering questions.

What explains the lack of pressure on an American candidate for president who didn’t receive a single primary vote to sit down with journalists⁶ and explain how she’d govern other than widespread corporate media complicity to help manipulate the public? We just had the most eventful political month in modern U.S. history and the main beneficiary hasn’t answered a single question about Biden leaving the race, what she knew, when she found out about the endorsement, or even how she feels entering a race after her opponent was nearly killed. Following Biden’s disastrous debate, media professionals suddenly wanted the president to talk to reporters because it would shake up circumstances unfavorable to Democrats. There are no calls today for that kind of transparency from Harris because it might shake up circumstances that are presently favorable to Democrats. It has been wild watching the press conspire to hide a candidate, then relentlessly hound him out of the race when it was apparent he couldn’t win, then revert right back to conspiring to hide the new Democratic candidate.

What we’ve seen in the media over the last three weeks is a relentless push to delete substance from campaign coverage because they know the public prefers the Republican stance on nearly every issue except abortion. In lieu of a governing agenda, the Harris-Walz ticket is retailing nebulous ephemera — “joy” — to a country that has had very little reason to experience jubilation over the past three years, and media squires are dutifully reading from the same Soviet glee club script.

This is a campaign pivot, and a desperate one at that. Donald Trump nearly getting his head blown off on live television rendered the persuasive power of the “Trump is a chaos agent and a threat to democracy” argument null and void. If you can’t scare the public into voting against Trump, you must convince them that your side is…joyful?

Time magazine’s Charlotte Alter says that the Harris campaign has engineered “the swiftest vibe shift in modern political history.” There’s a “party atmosphere” among Democrats, NPR reports, while an Associated Press analysis notes that Kamala and Walz are successfully “branding the Democratic ticket ‘joyful warriors.’” Their comportment contrasts with the “predictions of doom” emanating from the Trump campaign. “Vibes matter,” Salon avers. “Trump can hardly restrain his jealousy over the Harris campaign’s joy.”

Who needs to know what the potential next president of the United States wants to do with the power she seeks? Let the masses eat joy!

This media-generated “enthusiasm” is elite ignorance on a grand scale and fits squarely into the perception that Democrats come from a different strata of life than ordinary Americans. It takes a special kind of privilege to be able to vote based on “vibes” rather than policies and substance, and it is the mark of supreme stupidity to think that “joy” or “exuberance” takes precedence over competency, policy, or honesty.

But the herd messaging exemplified above paradoxically reveals the mainstream media’s value and worthlessness. These entities are obviously redundant; you get the same coordinated messaging whether you’re watching MSNBC or reading The Washington Post. But they retain value because the synchronization, repetition, and distribution are tremendously important in establishing a socially constructed consensus reality for people who lack the time or wherewithal to sift through the press’s daily avalanche of bullshit.

The reason that I despise the mainstream media as much as I do is not just because I think a Kamala Harris presidency would be an utter disaster and probably twice as bad as Biden’s term in office has been. It’s because I genuinely care about this country.

Simply put, it’s bad that the “press” — which plays a fundamental role in a well-functioning society by helping people make sense of the world and sort truths from falsehoods — is essentially the propaganda arm of the DNC, and that journalists are more concerned about operating as inoffensive courtiers for Democrats than fulfilling basic professional responsibilities and civic duties.

Newsrooms have been completely subverted in service of ideological surveillance and regimentation of the public. What passes for the media today is an exercise in doctrinal enforcement, with outlets sharing only information deemed healthy for public consumption, and usually with thickets of propagandistic contextualizing. Among legacy outlets there’s not even a pretense of being oppositional to those in power anymore.

And it just keeps getting worse. Over the past year, it’s as though the mainstream media has been testing to what extent systematic totalitarian mendacity and social control can be achieved within a system that still holds elections. The ass clowns at The New York Times and The Washington Post and MSNBC and CNN and The Atlantic and The New Yorker and Axios and The Guardian…these people have an epistemic obligation to the truth, and yet they repeatedly shirk that obligation, compromising morals and convincing themselves that anything less than stewarding the Official Democratic Line means ending up on the wrong side of history and undermining Progress™ and sabotaging the “enormity” of this moment in which a strong independent black woman might ascend to the highest office in the land.

And so they’re engaging in a frantic effort to fabricate stardom for Kamala Harris rather than vetting and scrutinizing her as a candidate. They know that it’s in voters’ interests to get an untreated eyeful of the Democratic Party’s nominee, that the press is supposed to be giving a full portrait of the person being considered for a four-year contract as commander in chief—a role with the most serious responsibilities imaginable. But having united around Harris in hysteria and fatalism, and having resolved to stick with her out of conformism, Democrats and their media allies have one tool to deal with her political weaknesses: lying.

And yeah, it’s horrible for the country. And yeah, I despise them for it.

1. Because the mainstream media teamed up with Democratic donors and party leaders to oust the nominee for President against the will of voters, there’s now extreme pressure to ensure Kamala Harris wins. If she doesn’t, the backlash will be severe.

2. NYT’s Michelle Goldberg: “She essentially received millions of votes to take over from Biden if he became incapacitated, and so she has a kind of democratic legitimacy.”

3. Not six months ago, many of these outlets were arguing that Kamala Harris should be dropped from the ticket and replaced with someone like Gretchen Whitmer. Many Democrats were saying privately — and some publicly — that if Biden were jettisoned from the ticket, there should be an accelerated primary contest because they couldn’t risk letting the vice president simply ascend to the job.

4. For perspective, early voting begins in Pennsylvania on Sept. 16. In Minnesota, Vermont, and Virginia, early voting begins around Sept. 20.

5. The Washington Post is literally running pro-Kamala Harris ads.

6. Rather remarkable that Kamala Harris is such an electoral liability that she has to dodge extended questioning from a press that installed her and is doing everything it can to ensure she wins.