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harris and walz seize on joyful message in contrast to the biden/harris tanking economy......

3 hours ago — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is joyous about the joy. “All the things that make me mad about those other guys and all the things they do wrong, ... Harris and Walz seize on joyful message in contrast to darker Trump themes...

https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2024/08/08

 

MEANWHILE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYPaMB6l10E

 

Now that Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has become Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, it is ostensibly time for the media to scrutinize his record and past statements. (Emphasis on ostensibly.)

To say the mainstream coverage of Walz has been fawning thus far would be quite an understatement; The New York Times described him as "a one-man rejoinder to the idea that the Democrats are the party of the cultural and coastal elite." The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel merrily aided media efforts to portray Walz as a lovable, folksy paternal figure, writing that "dad is on the ballot." CNN proclaimed the Harris-Walz team as "an antidote to Trump's American carnage."

 

ROBBY SOAVE    August 9

 

"Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to make America joyful again," wrote CNN's Stephen Collinson.

The task of scrutinizing Walz will clearly fall to other interested parties. (See Reason's Eric Boehm on his overall record, and this piece by me on his COVID-19 policies.)

Conservatives on social media did manage to dig up an old clip of Walz making an alarming and false claim: "There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy."

Walz is wrong, of course: The First Amendment, which vigorously protects Americans' free speech rights, does not distinguish between good information and misinformation. Moreover, so-called hate speech—an arbitrary category, as different people find different sorts of speech to be hateful—is quite obviously protected.

But that clip of Walz is only eight seconds long, and I am wary of taking people out of context. So I looked for the rest of the clip, which is available here.

Here is a rough transcript of Walz's response to a question from MSNBC about trying to trick people into not voting, or voting incorrectly.

"Years ago, it was the little things: telling people to vote the day after the election, and we kind of brushed them off. Now, we know it's intimidation at the ballot box. It's undermining the idea that mail-in ballots aren't legal. I think we need to push back on this. There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy. Tell the truth, where the voting places are, who can vote, who's able to be there. Watching some states continue to weaken the protections around the ballot I think is what's inspiring us to lean into this. Again, all we're asking is to make it as easy and simple as possible to exercise their right to vote and participate in our democracy. I'm in 100 percent agreement with you. That makes it so that more people are there, you get more opinions brought in, and I think it tempers [those] extremes that we get. Again, I can't imagine someone going and standing in line for eight hours to try and vote and then being told that maybe the votes didn't count or maybe something's wrong. You have these candidates who lose and are on these ridiculous court cases that they keep bringing up and losing on.”

Suffice it to say, the surrounding context does not greatly improve the accuracy of Walz's remark.

 

Dad Joke

It's unfortunately true that false statements about the time, place, and manner of voting in U.S. elections are occasionally criminalized. For instance, the Justice Department prosecuted a man, Douglass Mackey, for making jokes online encouraging Democrats to vote over the phone. The authorities cited an obscure law from 1870 aimed at preventing the Ku Klux Klan from threatening black voters away from the polls. The Volokh Conspiracy's Eugene Volokh was disturbed by the government's actions, and wrote that the authorities were entering murky territory.

If Walz had said that deliberately misinforming specific people about how and when to vote can be considered a criminal action under certain circumstances, he would have been on solid ground. But he was obviously making a much more general claim about spreading so-called election-related misinformation. Lumping in hate speech only weakens his claim even further: The Supreme Court has held that labeling speech as hateful does not render it unsayable. Indeed, the First Amendment is specifically designed to protect speech in the event that government authorities attempt to suppress it on such grounds. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his opinion on behalf of a unanimous Court in the 2017 case of Matal v. Tam: "Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate.'"

Walz is hardly the first political figure to make this mistake; high-level government and media actors who ought to know better frequently suggest that bad, wrong, and hateful speech is illegal. But his invocation of the dreaded specter of misinformation is especially concerning, given the current moral panic around the concept. As I've previously explained, an ever-expanding web of academic departments, quasi-governmental organizations, media watchdog groups, and publicly funded nonprofits have made it their business to police so-called misinformation on social media. Federal bureaucrats have encouraged content moderators to suppress speech—including jokes about elections. Government authorities frequently act as if they have the power to compel Americans to stop saying contrarian and satirical things about a range of political topics; sadly, they have often gotten away with it.

This is why Walz's misunderstanding about misinformation is important. With the Supreme Court having declined to prohibit federal agencies from jawboning social media companies, the next administration will have a relatively free hand to escalate the government's pressure campaign on disinformation. It's not an encouraging sign that the would-be Democratic vice president is fundamentally mistaken on a vital tenet of the country's free speech tradition. Maybe dad should learn something about the First Amendment?

https://www.aol.com/news/tim-walz-dead-wrong-misinformation-141525661.html

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

 

protest!......

 

Opinion: Planning to protest at the DNC in August? Here’s why you shouldn’t

 

By Peter Dreier and Maurice Isserman

 

A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention — a “March on the DNC” for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.

Here’s why.

In a democracy, protest movements can play a vital role in reshaping the national debate on important issues. But they have to hone their message and choose when and how to make their case. There were major protests at all three Democratic conventions in the 1960s. Two of them eventually got the results they hoped for. One backfired.

In 1960, when John F. Kennedy was nominated in Los Angeles, civil rights protesters, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., carefully orchestrated a 5,000-person march and daily pickets at the convention demanding a strong pro-civil rights plank in the Democratic platform. It was a first at a convention, and Kennedy was cautiously supportive, though it took several more years of protests before he embraced the Civil Rights Act, which became law in 1964, the year after his assassination.

When Lyndon B. Johnson was nominated that same year in Atlantic City, civil rights activists, now driving for voting rights, supported the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates in place of the all-white regular Mississippi delegation. They didn’t unseat the regulars, but their impact on delegates and public opinion was undeniable. A year later, with Johnson’s support, Congress passed the watershed Voting Rights Act.

The convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus. The leaders crafted demands that appealed to the best in the American democratic tradition — equal rights for all. They delivered historic gains for African Americans.

In 1968, when Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president in Chicago, it was a different story. Protesters again showed up in the streets outside the convention, this time to demonstrate their opposition to the Vietnam War. That opposition was justified. Targeting that convention that year, and their wild rumpus approach, was not.

Due mostly to the brutal tactics employed by the Chicago police, the result was bloody chaos in the streets. Some protest organizers believed dramatic televised images of confrontations would strengthen their cause, winning the sympathy of the viewing public.

They were wrong. Polling revealed that most television viewers — 56%, according to a Gallup poll — blamed the protesters, not the “police riot,” for the disturbances. Republican Richard Nixon, campaigning to restore “law and order,” defeated Humphrey that November. He prolonged the Vietnam War well into the next decade.

Antiwar protests ultimately helped shift public opinion away from the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. They produced a new wave of liberal and progressive politicians. But the protests at the 1968 Democratic convention set back the cau

Today, those who want to protest the war in Gaza need to think about how to further that goal. Will the cause of peace and Palestinian rights be helped or hindered by demonstrations at this year’s Democratic convention in Chicago?

More than 70 mostly small-membership organizations are endorsing the upcoming protests. The key organizers, the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a “day of rage” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.

Conspicuously absent from the list of endorsing organizations are the politically savvy major labor unions, civil rights and environmental organizations, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ groups, and community organizing networks, such as PICO California, MoveOn or Indivisible. 

Could it be that they recognize that in this election season, the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate? Perhaps they don’t want to lose voters to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos in the streets or rabid anti-Americanism.

Many of the groups behind the Chicago protests are not simply pro-Palestine or anti-Israel. As the “March on the DNC” website puts it, they dismiss the Democratic Party as “a tool of billionaires and corporations.”

Even one of the larger groups endorsing the demonstration, Democratic Socialists of America, has adopted a politically self-defeating rationale for doing so. DSA’s Chicago chapter recently posted that making the “DNC a complete political disaster” — through disruption, confrontation and extremist rhetoric — is as important as ending all U.S. support for Israel. 

In fact, many of these groups don’t believe in electoral politics as a vehicle for change. They are enamored of revolutionary fantasies. They seem to believe that Trump’s reelection can hasten the prospects for a fairy-tale end to capitalism.

In the meantime, they are indifferent to the threat that a second Trump administration poses to democracy, workers, the environment, immigrants, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, the poor, respect for science, voting rights, common decency and, yes, even to Palestinian rights. (Trump is a strong ally of Israel’s most conservative forces.)

If this year’s Chicago protests produce scenes of chaos in the streets and Democratic-leaning voters decide to abstain or choose a doomed third-party candidate — who will benefit? In a remarkable bit of political jujitsu, the Republicans, instigators of the Jan. 6 insurrection, are campaigning as the party of law and order.

Protests may achieve changes we want to see. But this time, it’s too risky. Instead of demonstrating against Democrats, we’re going to campaign and vote for them. You should too.

Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College and is the author of several books including “We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style.” Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College; his books include “America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.”

 

REALLY?

Two college professors who studied and lived in the 1960s recently published an  opinion piece in The Lose Angelese Times opinion piece urging dissidents not to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The first paragraph is a stark example of uber-liberals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome:

“A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention — a ‘March on the DNC’ for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.”

Cheri Honkala, an advocate for decades for the poor and homeless in the streets of Philadelphia, plans to lead the Poor People’s Army in a march to the steps of the United Center on the convention’s opening day. If she is “radical fringe,” then so am I. 

The tireless and fearless founder of Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991, Honkala is now the Poor People’s Army’s national spokesperson and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. 

She has been arrested over 200 times, but says that her worst was at the July Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where she tried to serve an arrest warrant on Trump and the Republican Party for crimes against humanity. 

Police cuffed her, then drove her alone in a van to a closed prison where 200 military police officers sat at tables, ready to be of service to convention security on demand. They locked her in a room with glass walls for hours, then drove her to an empty warehouse district where they let her out at night in a thunder and lightning storm, with no wallet and no phone.  

She is now preparing to confront the Democrats. Chicago was compelled to grant the Poor People’s Army a permit to march to the steps of the convention at Chicago’s United Center after failing to respond to her appeal of a permit denial. Authorities are now attempting to reroute the march, but the Poor People’s Army does not plan to back down.  

The protests will address domestic crises as well as the genocide against Palestinians. Honkala talks about the reality of the streets, telling Black Agenda Report that, 

“More Americans have died because of the opiate crisis than died in the Vietnam War. Millions of dollars have come into Philadelphia, supposedly to help with recovery programs and housing and services here, but it never makes it to the people.”

However, these learned professors of the 1960s writing in the LA Times assert that those preparing to protest must support the Democratic Party and its candidates because Donald Trump is a new Hitler who will end democracy. They say this is not the time for protest. 

Malcom X Comes to Mind

But who determines when to be patient and ask for incremental change, and when to demand radical change?  At this point even national health care, closing Guantanamo, or increasing the national minimum wage to minimum subsistence, would be radical change. Malcom X comes to mind: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” Sometimes, incrementalism doesn’t work.

Though the professors express “concern” about the genocide in Gaza, their piece speaks only of the Israeli hostages, not of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, held without charges, sexually assaulted, and tortured. A Knesset member recently said that rape of Palestinian prisoners is legitimate. 

Oct. 7 happened in part because of all the Palestinians in prison with no charges or hope of a trial. The only ceasefire after Oct. 7 brought Palestinian prisoners home at a 3:1 ratio to Israeli hostages but the ratio of remaining Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages is still far higher. Prisoner release will be part of any negotiation and must be one of the demands of the Palestinian solidarity movement. 

The professors say they support a two-state solution, but that dream is long dead; members of the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly have repeated it like a mantra for decades as Israel colonized more land in the West Bank and rained bombs on Gaza. President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department continue to invoke it but say that it can only be created by negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, which is to say not at all. 

Oct. 7 happened because 75 years of negotiations failed. The recent Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh dimmed hopes of a negotiated settlement any time soon.

These men of the ’60s claim that “the convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus.” But why would anyone trust their “within and without” strategy after the Democratic Party elite stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from running as a Democrat this year? 

The long cover-up of Biden’s decline and his unceremonious replacement with Kamala Harris, a lock-em-up candidate who has never won a single delegate, reeks of Deep State. Many are asking, “Who is in charge, given the president’s obviously impaired faculties?” 

While praise is showered on Biden’s alleged prowess in negotiating the recent historic and complicated international prisoner exchange, his incompetence was evident in the disastrous June 27 debate.  He confuses Haifa with Rafa, and Mexico with Egypt. There is no way he negotiated the prisoner exchange.

According to the LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.”  The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause.”  

The DNC protests are allegedly why Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, who continued the Vietnam War longer — they hypothesize — than Humphrey would have.  Of course the anti-war candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had probably just been assassinated by the Deep State, after winning the California primary, all but assuring his nomination. But rather than protest, we should have quietly urged an anti-war platform?  

Humphrey promised to stop bombing North Vietnam and seek a ceasefire after the convention and before the election, because it was clear that the anti-war movement couldn’t be ignored. Would he have made those promises without the protests in Chicago? Would he have kept them if elected?  There is no way to know for sure. 

As one who was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War, I knew that it was imperative to let the Vietnamese know we were in solidarity with them, and the Palestinians deserve no less. We must express our outrage at both parties for their support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“The key organizers,” the professors write, 

“the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a ‘day of rage’ as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.” 

If burning an American flag, a form of protest protected by the Supreme Court, and defacing monuments as acts of rage against war criminal Netanyahu make protestors “ultra-leftist,” then sign me up. 

Rather than using labels like ultra-leftist, why not challenge what this group actually says, specifically and factually? The global stakes are quite high, so clarification and accuracy are essential.  The Poor People’s Army and Code Pink are also among the organizers. The protests are organized by a coalition of groups determined to challenge the Democrats in the streets over their position on Palestine. Let’s not bring back Red baiting.

According to the professors, “…the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate.” 

They don’t want to lose voters “to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos…” But it is past time to expose the chaos to the light of day. We would be immoral to stand passively by as the U.S. funds genocide in Palestine and plays a game of nuclear chicken with Russia in Ukraine.  

Rather than conceding all political space to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Kamala Harris, we must expose how fundamentally undemocratic it is. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice, kept RFK Jr out of this year’s Democratic primary, then shoehorned Kamala Harris into place with the barest semblance of Democratic process; a bunch of no-name delegates quickly met and agreed to throw their support to her. 

According to renowned journalist Seymour Hersch, Barack Obama threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment if he didn’t step down. It’s all about backroom deals and Deep State manipulations, while the rest of us wonder who’s really in charge. Yet the professors scoff at the notion that the Democratic Party is “a tool of billionaires and corporations.”  It’s not?

Ajamu Baraka recently wrote:  

“The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat Party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup…The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs who control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.” 

People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous. People planning to go to Chicago’s DNC this year to protest Democratic Party complicity in the ongoing Gaza genocide are also courageous and righteous.  Crash the party is a slogan of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.  Sign me up.  We need to get that foot off our necks.

Riva Enteen is the former program director of the San Francisco National Lawyers Guild.  She is a lifelong peace and justice activist, retired social worker, lawyer, and editor of  ”Follow the Money,” interviews by Pacifica Radio Flashpoints producer Dennis J. Bernstein.  In 2019, she went to Russia with a 50-member peace delegation.  Black Agenda Report printed many of her articles.  Riva can be reached at rivaenteen@gmail.com.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/08/on-the-call-not-to-protest-in-chicago/

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

harris' bombs....

Kamala Harris will not support an arms embargo on Israel, her national security adviser says, a day after the presidential candidate was heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally in Detroit.

In a post on Twitter/X, Biden administration official Phil Gordon said Ms Harris "has been clear: she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups".

The statement came after leaders of the Uncommitted movement - which has urged Democrats to boycott the election over US support for Israel - said Ms Harris had "expressed an openness" to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo. 

Mr Gordon seemed to dispute that report. He added that Ms Harris "will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law".

His statement comes as tensions in the Middle East continue to escalate. Iran has threatened to "punish" Israel after the assassination of Hamas's political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last week. Israel has not claimed responsibility. 

The US has accelerated its weapon supplies to Israel since the October 7 Hamas attacks. Both Mr Biden and Ms Harris have called for a ceasefire and more humanitarian aid in Gaza. 

Since Mr Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed his second in command, leaders of the Uncommitted movement have been pressing Ms Harris to halt US military support for Israel.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg798l439ydo

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

george washington biden....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYDobQFgrg0

Watch Compliant Media Spin Kamala Harris All About "Joy" While Avoiding Interviews, w/ Andrew Klavan

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW_UsV7RjF0

BUTTER CARVING...

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

joyous vibes....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebHawOSlnqY

 

Laura: The media is trying hard to protect Kamala

 

Fox News host Laura Ingraham calls out the mainstream media's coverage of Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign on 'The Ingraham Angle.'

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

kommander not.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVwehu6AY6

New Unearthed Videos Raise More Questions About Tim Walz' Military Record, w/ Jashinsky and Johnson

Megyn Kelly is joined by Emily Jashinsky of UnHerd and Eliana Johnson of the Washington Free Beacon to talk about new controversies regarding VP Tim Walz and his military service, unearthed videos of how others mischaracterized his record and his refusal to correct them, the apparent lack of vetting by the Harris campaign, and more.

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

soft on crime....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcz0al6On5A

McEnany: Kamala REALLY wants you to believe this

 

'Outnumbered' panelists discuss Kamala Harris' move to bill herself as tough-on-crime despite her liberal record in the Senate and as California's attorney general.

 

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SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKpp0rbp5Pc

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

pants and pearls....

 

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

 

Those populating the vice president’s joy-and-vibes crowd can pretend to celebrate a state of elation while acquiescing to their candidate’s approval of mass murder.

 

Many commentators have attempted to describe the astonishing devolution of Democratic Party politics into sheer marketing: Kamala Harris as product, “new and improved” like a laundry detergent or a frozen dinner. 

Vanessa Beeley calls it “cartoon theatrics,” and it’s as good as I’ve seen. In two words the British journalist captures from a useful distance the infantilism of the Harris-for-president campaign and the Hollywoodization of American politics.

I thought I’d seen everything in this line until a few days ago, but in this, the most unserious political season of my lifetime, it is incautious to make any such assumption.

There is always more — something worse — another step down into a sort of political nihilism that leaves the electorate stupefied as the imperium conducts its violent, illegal business.

A truly vulgar graphic artist named Kii Arens now gives us a Kamala Harris campaign poster that is a beyond-belief case in point.

This is “Kamala” against a pastel field, no surname necessary, the presidential candidate as a striding figure out of the 1960s counterculture, an heroic hippie. I hope you are ready for the tag line. It is “Vote Joy 2024.”

My mind was on other things when I first came across this poster. And it landed abruptly as an assault and an insult all at once.

Just glance at it for now: This is how some Democratic voters, and I suspect many, want to imagine a candidate who supports and advances, among various other late-imperial crimes, a genocide of world-historical significance.

The imagery seems, somehow, an almost criminal violation of human intelligence.

“There is always more, something worse, another step down into a sort of political nihilism that leaves the electorate stupefied as the imperium conducts its violent, illegal business.”

Kii Arens makes his living doing pop-art graphics — logos and such — for a lot of show business people and credits Saturday morning children’s television as his primary inspiration. Out in California he owns and runs the La La Land Gallery, which seems about right.

Kii Arens seems to take himself very seriously indeed. And it goes this way: Either Kii Arens has overestimated the gullibility, self-delusions and unconsciousness of liberal voters, especially those who consider themselves “progressive” or “left,” or I have underestimated the same.

I fear Kii Arens may have me on this one. “People are really excited about this poster,” he said in a brief video interview after giving away copies of it at the Democrats’ convention in Chicago. “People are connecting emotionally to my art.”

When I first saw the “Kamala” poster it was via a social media message Katrina vanden Heuvel sent out, with cheerful approval, on “X.”

Vanden Heuvel, as many readers will know, is the editorial director of The Nation. It is important to take note. In “Vote Joy 2024” we find the denouement of the long, pitiful story of what has become of the American “left” and why this term now requires quotation marks.

I have long thought politics can be usefully read as an expression of antecedent cultural and psychological phenomena.

Psychic Journey 

This is how I view the Kii Arens poster and why I think it merits careful scrutiny: It is a window, or maybe a Rosetta Stone, in which we can read the coded interiority of the “left’s” psychic journey from the honorable commitments of earlier times to… to what?… to a state of willful political and intellectual immaturity.

Now study the poster for a good few minutes.

There is Harris, of course, in her standard pantsuit and pearls — the political candidate with whom we are familiar. She is serious and altogether credible, but wears that having-fun, sorority-sister smile that endears her to many Democratic voters.

There are the flowers splashed across the whole of the graphic. These are essential to the overall effect. They are the kind of flowers you see on the walls of grade-school art classes.

And they are “flower power” flowers. They bathe Harris in an aesthetic of innocence, with a subliminal suggestion of a childlike guiltlessness. Note Harris’s stride in this connection: It is purposeful, but with the air of a carefree girl walking in a garden.

And then the typefaces. The “Vote Joy 2024” in the lower right immediately draws the eye. It is subtly but unmistakably a reference to the posters associated with the late – ’60s rock scene — a variation on Psychedelic Fillmore West and Psychedelic Fillmore East (which, believe it or not, are two recognized typefaces).

Kii Arens has added a couple of small touches I must mention for the sheer fun of them. He has inscribed a faint paisley pattern into Harris’s presidential pantsuit. Paisley. Dwell upon paisley for a sec and see what you think this means.

And beneath the pantsuit he has Kamala Harris wearing canvas sneakers — those flimsy black Converse things favored by young people who are, to put it charitably, casually dressed.

Sheer fun: and if you think about it, a very pure case of pointedly manipulated imagery.

If I were a certain kind of columnist, I would say the poster Kii Arens has made to express his enthusiasm for the Harris campaign (which he now sells for $47, extra for framing) is, as was just shouted to me from across the room, “a complete mind-fuck.”

But I am not that kind of columnist. I will not say this poster, with all its flower power iconography in behalf of a warmonger, is a complete mind-fuck.

I would say the physiologically ambitious intent of this poster is to perform the act of love on the cerebral cavity. Way more acceptable for a family publication such as Consortium News.

I do not know whether the Harris campaign commissioned this thing. I suspect they like it well enough but did not order it up. In the video interview mentioned above, Kii Arens comes over as an averagely guileless, averagely indoctrinated liberal with no clue of the diabolic cynicism with which the Democratic Party is inventing Kamala Harris of whole cloth.

My read: “Vote Joy 2024” comes straight out of Kii Arens’s unconscious, and this is what makes it interesting. It is fair enough, and useful, if we think of Arens as the id of those “progressive” and “left”–inclined voters the Harris campaign must seduce if “Kamala” is to win in November.

I do not know how many Democratic voters buy into the various signifiers Arens has inscribed into his poster. I suspect he speaks for very many — someone should check his sales — but let us set this aside.

His work is certainly a disturbing measure of the extent to which those who could well propel Harris to the White House in November are prepared to delude themselves into seeing things in Kamala Harris that are simply not there.

“My art is supposed to reflect positivity, hope, and joy,” Arens says in the videoed interview. There are a lot of Democrats looking for just these things in the figure of Kamala Harris. But this is not the remark of an aware or self-aware American in the late-summer of 2024. It is the remark of someone who is determinedly neither.

Kii Arens has slathered on the semiology in his “Vote Joy 2024” poster with a trowel. Semiology is the science of signs, of significations. In what signs is Kii Arens trafficking?

As an aesthetic object the Arens poster is crude, but this is of no matter. It is dense with many-layered signifiers, and these are what matter.

There are important insights to be gained as we examine these layers and discover what, taken together, they have to say — about the long regression at the left-hand end of America’s politics, about liberal and “left” voters’ fears, fantasies, and failures of nerve.

Here is the Brittanica definition of “flower power.” It is a good place to begin.

“Flower power: the belief that war is wrong and that people should love each other and lead peaceful lives — used especially to refer to the beliefs and culture of young people (called hippies) in the 1960s and 1970s.”

Instantly we learn something.

We have heard daily talk of “joy” and “vibes” since the Democratic Party’s elites and donors undemocratically imposed Kamala Harris as their 2024 candidate.

And now we find, via an admittedly goofy but probably representative Harris voter with an amateur gift for social psychology, that beneath all this compulsive “positivity” there seems to lie a strong streak of nostalgia.

Why, the obvious question, do the liberal voters for whom Arens speaks, or to whom he speaks, or both, indulge in a nostalgia for a time they never knew?

Why is it important that they identify so strongly with those whose political and cultural commitments, however gauzily recalled, gave the 1960s the reputation the decade has in the public consciousness.

Nostalgic Retreat

Why the historical reference? Answer this and we can see into the strange dynamic driving the wave of enthusiasm for the Harris campaign as it floats along on puffy clouds of joy and good vibes.

Nostalgia, I have long argued, is at bottom a symptom of depression. Nostalgists are those who retreat into the past as a refuge from a present they find in one or another way unbearable.

And here I offer a corollary thought: The sensation of powerlessness is a primary cause of depression. Any good psychiatrist would confirm this.

With this in mind, think about all those people “connecting emotionally” to Kii Arens’s iconography, and then all the others who may not have not seen it but would similarly identify with it. That these people are in some inchoate way nostalgic is beyond argument.

The follow-on conclusion seems to me equally evident: All the talk of joy and vibes is at bottom a mask for a more or less prevalent depression people cannot admit to themselves they suffer.

As the Britannica notes in its stuffy, wooden fashion, “peace” and “love” were among the totemic terms that characterized the 1960s counterculture Arens unsubtly references. But you cannot, plain and simple, walk around today talking of either and expect to be taken seriously.

Ours is not a polity that gives any credence to notions of peace and neighborly love. This is absolutely out.

Propagandists and ideologues have long since transformed mainstream American culture — since the Reagan years, I would say — into a culture of war and animus.

And so we return to joy and vibes. These are excellent terms for those given to fantastic readings of Kamala Harris.

To stand for peace and love 50 or 60 years ago was to challenge what people used to call “the establishment.” They had meanings, however angelic were those professing these things.

“Joy” and “vibes” have no meanings. This is why they have caught on like fires in a dry forest. They do not signify challenges to anything; they license an extraordinary flinch from everything.

Everything: American participation in a genocide, the proxy war in Ukraine, the incessant and increasingly dangerous provocations of China, the brutalizing sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, and all such serious matters of policy.

“’Joy’ and ‘vibes’ have no meanings. This is why they have caught on like fires in a dry forest.”

There is no need to think about any of this. There is, indeed, an unwritten code that the crises of our time, America’s leaders responsible for all of them, are neither to be thought about nor mentioned.

It is brilliant, I would say, this mutilation of logic and reasoning. There is something for everyone in it.

For the Harris campaign the childish nonsense of joy and vibes is a diabolically effective blind. Behind it Harris’ people — and Kamala Harris is nothing more than the sum total of her advisers — can commit to the imperium’s foreign policies without the bother of public scrutiny.

Just leave all that to us: This is the message the Harris people have as they flatly refuse to take up any of the questions that matter most to the imperium’s citizens.

And for those subscribing to the joy-and-vibes ethos, from Katrina vanden Heuvel on down, this is a twofer.

They can persuade themselves they will stand against the established order by voting for the established order. Tell me you know anyone who has deceived himself or herself so cleverly as this.

And while arranging the wilted flowers in their hair, those populating the joy-and-vibes crowd can pretend to celebrate a state of elation while acquiescing to their candidate’s approval of mass murder.

This is important to these people, for they must at all costs avoid facing their utter powerlessness, and so their subliminal depression, as they succumb once more to voting for an evil it is a stretch to consider the lesser of anything.

Sacrifice & Risk 

One question lingers as I glance again at the Kii Arens poster. What under the sun happened to the American left between its years at the barricades in the service of honorable causes and this, its time of weak-minded gutlessness?

When did it pass from left to “left”? There is a book in the answer to this, the interior history of several generations, but I will keep this brief.

One of the remarkable features of the antiwar and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, along with the principled feminists of those years, was the willingness of so many people to accept the necessity of sacrifice. Sacrifice and risk, I would say.

“What … happened to the American left between its years at the barricades in the service of honorable causes and this, its time of weak-minded gutlessness?”

Such people understood: If you cannot stand for what you think is right and accept all the consequences attaching to being authentically who you are, your thoughts and being are of no use. You understood the necessity of living beyond the fence posts, having concluded nothing of worth could get done within them if your intent was to work for genuine change.

And so one gave up well-paid employment, or life in a good neighborhood, or holidays along the coast of Maine, or whatever else comprised one’s version of middle-class privilege. 

A certain precarity often accompanied these choices. Your car was a clunker. The heat pipes clanked.

Gradually over many years, the energy and commitment — the commitment to committing, let’s say — faded.

I saw this in people younger than I as early as the mid–1970s. People wanted to think of themselves as “activist,” as “committed,” as standing for “change,” as — totemic word here — as “movement.” But careers came first. The thought took hold that one could get the worthy work done inside the fence posts and without taking any risks.

Deitrich Bonhoffer, the celebrated German pastor who paid with his life for his resistance to the Reich, used to speak and write of cheap grace and costly grace.

The former means, in secular terms, the pretense of an honorable life without sacrifice. The latter is the opposite: To earn costly grace means to live and work honorably and paying whatever price one must for it.

I am talking about the difference between the two as this came to be at the left-hand side of the garden over the past 50 or so years.

A book I began reading last spring bears very well on this question. Anne Dufournmantelle, a greatly respected psychoanalyst who died tragically at 53 in 2017, published Éloge du risque (Payott & Rivage) in 2011; Fordham University Press brought it out as In Praise of Risk eight years later. After sitting on my shelf for several years, this has made its way among the most important books of my life.

We cannot live authentic lives unless we accept the constant presence of risk, Dufourmantelle argued over the course of 51 brief chapters (which do not have to be read in order).

She means the risks inherent as we make all our choices — risks in relationships, risks in our victories and surrenders, risks in our public lives as well as our private, the risks altogether in how we live.

And the greatest of all risks, Dufourmantelle writes, is the first one we must take if we are to take all the others. This is the risk we take when we overcome our fear of life and determine to live.

It is, she says, “the risk of not dying.” And by not-dying she means refusing the death in life to which most people succumb as they surrender to conformity, or to inaction, or to our paranoiac addiction to total certainty.

And so to my concluding point.

Kii Arens is merely a product of his moment, not to be singled out as anything more. His poster is a cultural text. This is testimony to the vulgarization of American public discourse, but it nonetheless — or maybe for this reason — bears interpretation.

Among other things, the iconography of his poster reminds us that the Harris-for-president campaign is in considerable measure a psychological phenomenon.

I read “Vote Joy 2024” not as a celebration of the Harris-for-president project but as an implicit admission of what is absent from it. It is a document recording, in the simplest terms, the regret of those who have refused the risk of not dying while envying those before them who took it.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

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https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/06/patrick-lawrence-vote-joy-a-delusion-of-nostalgia/

 

 

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