Friday, July 26, 2019

THE RACIAL RADICALISM OF KAMALA HARRIS



                It was only a matter of time before the legion of leftist lunatics seeking the Democrat presidential nomination was divided between front-runners and laggards by political, financial, and media realities. 

                Although some 22 or 23 motley candidates remain in technical contention, the polls, media coverage, and contribution data seem to have reduced the field even at this early stage to four realistic leading candidates:  Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders.  Some would add the Rainbow Mayor of embattled South Bend, Peter Buttigieg, but he is now much closer to the hapless 2 percenters in the polls (he's at about 5% nationally) than he is to the four leaders (who range from three now clustered at 12-15% to leader Biden at 29%).  Such early polls can be sharply misleading if relied upon for precise outcome projections, of course, but here we are only talking about a gross division between the broad categories of leaders and laggards.

                Beyond this general division, however, influential elements of the Democrat-Left and its mainstream media arm seem to have settled upon one candidate in particular as their early favorite, despite Biden's lead in the polls:  Senator Kamala Harris of California.  Even some influential Republicans, like ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have touted Harris as the likely Democrat nominee.

                In a sane and sensible political environment, Harris would hardly seem to have the right stuff for a front-running presidential candidate.  On the national stage, she has little to show in terms of experience or accomplishment:  Barely two years of utterly undistinguished service as a U.S. Senator.  Period.  No significant legislation or successful policy initiative bears her name, and whatever senatorial prominence she had gained before seeking the presidency derived solely from her obnoxious, ill-tempered, and duplicitous outbursts in contentious committee hearings. 

                                                                         
                                                                                     lousalvador.home.blog
         Harris is closer to Al Sharpton than she is to reasonable positions on race.

                Similarly, her earlier service as Attorney General of California was at best undistinguished and at worst inept and dishonest.  Among other derelictions, she refused to take any position on a package of major criminal sentencing-reform initiatives which a strong attorney general would have pounced upon, one way or the other; she notoriously failed to prosecute Steve Mnuchin's California bank, OneWest, despite evidence "suggestive of widespread misconduct," while later accepting Mnuchin's donations to her senatorial campaign; and she arrogantly refused to defend Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure resoundingly approved by California voters affirming that marriage is solely between a man and a woman, leaving the measure undefended in federal court and effectively overriding a crucially important vote of the people.

                But actual accomplishments and effective leadership experience are not the qualities the Democrat Left favors in seeking presidential candidates.  If they were, Barack Obama would not have been the Democrats' nominee in 2008, when his sparse qualifications were eerily similar to those now presented by Kamala Harris. 

                Rather, today's Democrats are obsessed with considerations of race, gender, leftist ideology, and rabid hostility towards President Trump and his supporters in choosing their leaders.  Moreover, the Democrats have abandoned any reliance upon the ameliorating qualities of tactful charm and conciliatory style (as opposed to substance) that enabled Obama to conceal his leftist orientation from the clueless middle of the electorate in 2008 and 2012.  Current candidates like Harris, Warren, and Sanders have made it clear they are in no mood to charm or conciliate the roughly one-half of America's populace who support President Trump.  Quite the contrary.

                In this environment, the ascendancy of Kamala Harris as the anointed favorite of the Democrat and Media Left seems almost inevitable.  She is a photogenic female who flies the colors of black ethnicity, even though she is more Asiatic Indian than Black American (her father descends from Jamaican Blacks and her mother from Asiatic Indians).  This ethnic ambiguity does not seem to trouble genuine Black Americans from considering her one of their own – although the jury is still out on that --  while it enables her to extend her minority/ethnic appeal to South Asian-Americans. 

                Thus, Harris punches both the women's and minority cards.  This in itself gives her near-decisive advantages over the white male and white female candidates, not to mention over the single significant black male candidate, Senator  Booker of New Jersey.  Further, Harris fervidly endorses all the Left's favored social and sexual issues, like unlimited abortion, homosexual predominance, and the subordination of female privacy and modesty to the demands of trans-sexual intruders (i.e., she supports the radical legislation making sex or gender a matter of personal election, rather than biological reality, for purposes of federal law).  She also advocates the legalization of prostitution.

                But for whatever reason, powerful elements of the Democratic establishment, its hard-left political base, and especially the leftist mainstream media seem determined to anoint Sen. Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee -- and then assure her election "by all means necessary."

                If this grim prospect doesn't shock and infuriate all sane and sensible Americans, it should.  Because Kamala Harris, plain and simple, is a radical, afro-racist, anti-white, left-wing virago.  She should be allowed no closer to the presidency than earth is to the Crab Nebula.

                Harris's obsession with radical race-based programs and policies that benefit blacks and penalize whites (and in some cases Hispanics and East Asians as well) is open, unambiguous, and utterly unapologetic.

                She apparently believes that her race-focused approach will ingratiate her with the Democrat-Left base, yet fail to offend the moderates and independents needed to win a general election.  She is probably right on the former point, but the latter is dubious.  If not, we are in for difficult times indeed.

                Harris was one of the first and foremost of the Democrat candidates to openly support the spiteful, divisive, outdated, and obscenely unfair proposal of so-called economic reparations for slavery.  A reparations program for a slavery system that the White Americans of the Union dismantled with their blood, sweat, and treasury over 150 years ago would be unworkable, dysfunctional, unjust, and racially incendiary.  That is why even liberal advocates of race-based remedies (like President Obama) rejected reparations long ago as a hopelessly unworkable delusion – until its recent resurrection from the policy graveyard by afro-racist radicals and, subsequently, by pandering presidential candidates like Kamala Harris.

                Harris doesn't care that such reparations would forcibly transfer money (via taxes) from lower- and middle-class whites, Hispanics, and East Asians who had nothing to do with slavery to wealthy blacks (like herself) who were born a century or more after its abolition.  Millions of the putative black recipients of reparations have thrived and prospered in a legal and governmental system so far removed from slavery that blacks have long been systematically favored over whites under affirmative action and preference programs governing employment, education, housing, and extension of credit.  Harris completely discounts over fifty years of such government preferences and multi-billion-dollar grant and subsidy programs that have already benefitted millions of blacks (including those descended from slaves) without resorting to the unworkable and divisive procedures that would be entailed by a vindictive reparations program.

                As though her advocacy of reparations were not radical enough, Senator Harris has further proposed the resurrection of the insidious school busing programs that most Americans (blacks included) had considered rightfully dead and buried. 

                Harris brought the moribund busing issue back to life with a cheap shot against Mr. Biden in the Democratic debate, where she sanctimoniously portrayed herself as some kind of California Rosa Parks, bravely integrating segregated schools in, of all places, Berkeley, California.  The leftist media and political establishment swooned and gave her great plaudits for this subterfuge, when she should have been sharply condemned for her bald-faced fraud and hypocrisy.  The Berkeley schools were simply not segregated, and Ms. Harris' bus rides to a good public school had all the danger and drama of a suburban princess riding her bus to the Montessori School.

                Apart from falsely portraying herself as a brave heroine of desegregation, Harris's support for forcibly busing children from their natural neighborhood schools into distant and sometimes dangerous schools represents another example of her brazenly wrong-headed anti-white ideology.  Until extreme racial pandering gained prominence in the current democrat presidential campaigns, forced busing to achieve some desired level of racial balancing had been decisively rejected (and largely forgotten) not only by politicians, courts, and policymakers but also by both white and black parents.  It is a measure of her racial radicalism that Kamala Harris would advocate the resurrection of such a toxic and divisive policy, with reckless disregard for its divisive and damaging consequences.

                Not content with her incendiary advocacy of renewed racial busing, Harris further upped the racial ante by proposing an enormous, budget-busting program of race-based housing subsidies for blacks.  Specifically, Harris proposes to spend $100 billion of taxpayer funds to help black families buy the homes of their choice.  See https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/07/07/kamala-harris-bribes-black-voters-100-billion-in-taxpayer-money-for-housing-772368. 

                As Harris explained her plan:  "After generations of discrimination, it’s time to give Black families a real shot at homeownership. . . . If we eliminate racial wealth disparities in homeownership rates, median Black wealth would grow $32,113 per household, and the wealth gap between Black and white households would shrink 31%.”  In fact, the federal government has been discriminating in favor of blacks in housing policy for decades, not the other way around.  It was ill-conceived government programs to eliminate minimal credit standards – e.g., through the Community Reinvestment Act -- to facilitate black home ownership that were largely responsible for the disastrous housing and financial bubble crisis of 2008-09.  Now Harris wants to do it all again, at catastrophic cost to taxpayers and the economcy, all in furtherance of her egregious political pandering to black democrats and their leftist cheerleaders.

                Even while this post was being written, Harris has proposed yet another multi-billion dollar race-based program in her seemingly inexhaustible pandering to black voters and the guilt-ridden, self-hating white leftists.  As though trillions for reparations and $100 billion for black housing were not enough extravagance, Harris now promises to invest an additional $60 billion in historically black colleges (HBC's) – schools that already receive an enormous amount of federal financial support even while they often discriminate against non-blacks.  But Harris was still not done spending your money to buy herself more votes.  Before the ink was dry on her HBC give-away plan, she announced an additional $12 billion for so-called "entrepeneurship" programs devoted to the black community.

                Needless to say, the expenditure of these absurdly astronomical amounts of federal funds on handouts to the 13% black portion of the population is nothing less than fiscal and budgetary insanity – wholly apart from the resentment and discord it would incite among elements of the population who would pay for the very programs that exclude them on racial grounds.  Yet the reckless and radical Senator Harris seems utterly oblivious to the disastrous consequences inherent in her proposals.

                In that respect, a critical thread that runs through Harris's racialist proposals is her utter disregard for the constitutional standards that limit such programs. 

                Government grants or preferences based on racial classifications are subject to the equal protection standards of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments.  Specifically, such programs must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government objective under settled Supreme Court precedents, notably the 1995 case of Adarand v. Pena.  Harris's race-based proposals are unlikely to satisfy these constitutional standards.  Merely granting generalized benefits to blacks, or seeking to remove generic disparities between white and black wealth or income, do not constitute compelling government objectives under the governing precedents; in any event, Harris's grossly overinclusive programs are anything but "narrowly tailored." 

                Although Harris is an experienced lawyer and former state attorney general, she appears wholly oblivious of the demanding constitutional standards that her race-based programs must satisfy.  As a demagogue of the left, however, Harris scorns the rule of law and the Constitution whenever it stands in the way of her pandering political proposals.

                A final racial issue that Senator Harris exploits is the mindlessly repeated falsehood that the death penalty discriminates against blacks.  As Harris has stated, "“As a career law enforcement official, I have opposed the death penalty because it is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars."  Specifically, she claims that black and Latino defendants are more likely to be executed than white defendants. 

                Piling on the demagoguery, Harris has further stated:  “The symbol of our justice system is a woman with a blindfold.  It is supposed to treat all equally, but the application of the death penalty — a final and irreversible punishment — has been proven to be unequally applied.”  She therefore promises, if elected, to support abolition of the federal death penalty.

                But as repeatedly demonstrated on this blog and elsewhere, Harris's claim that the death penalty is discriminatorily applied against blacks is patently and demonstrably false.  Not only false, but the opposite of the truth.

                What makes Harris's phony claim especially disturbing is that the facts which contradict it are so emphatically clear and readily available.  One need only click on the easily accessible databases of the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to confirm that for at least the last three decades the death penalty has been imposed disproportionally against whites rather than blacks.

                Simply put, for decades blacks have consistently committed slightly over 50% of U.S. murders (the only crime for which the death penalty is constitutionally permitted), yet represent only about 33% of those executed.  Recent years have emphatically reinforced this pattern of disproportionate execution of white defendants in the U.S.  In 2016, for example, out of 20 total executions in the U.S., 18 were white.  See BJS, Captal Punishment, 2016, Table 2 (April 2018).  Year after year, the pattern confirmed by BJS and FBI data is the same:  Blacks commit slightly more than half of U.S. murders, but white defendants predominate among those executed.  Yet racial agitators like Kamala Harris persist in perpetrating the canard that the death penalty is disproportionately imposed on black and minority defendants.  It is a Big Lie of grotesque proportions.

                On issue after issue – reparations, forced busing, privileged federal handouts for blacks, and race-based death penalty demagoguery – Kamala Harris pursues radical programs and policies that expressly favor blacks at the expense of the blameless non-black citizens who must fund or endure them.  If this does not constitute racist politics, it is hard to imagine what would.  At a time when the country is already burdened by toxic racial divisions, the nomination or election of this deeply divisive radical would be disastrous.

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