A "NOTHING LIKE HER" DRAWING...

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

The article below was originally published in the August issue of the New English Review under the title, "The Real Indictment Against Kamala Harris".  But this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer demonstrated that the British government is likewise keen to use "lawfare" against its own citizens, so we reprint that piece with a short preface by the same author.

Keir Starmer has revealed his true colors as the first Stalinist prime minister of Britain. But has anyone noticed that he shares the essential trait that I recently identified with the aspiring next president of the United States: both rose to power by putting people in prison? Before seeking political office, Starmer served as the Director of Public Prosecutions, a powerful position in Britain that was already being politicized.

His outburst reveals why this skill is so useful to today’s authoritarian western politician when he threatens citizens whose political views differ from his with not only prosecutions but “convictions”. So convictions are not the culminations of court deliberations, weighing evidence in each case, applying procedural safeguards, and observing due process of law. No, convicting people of crimes is a virtue for its own sake and a legitimate weapon to threaten and punish people whose politics you dislike or whose mouths you want to stop.

Incidentally, I explored this mentality in my previous book, The New Politics of Sex (pp. 123-157), where I found that it was pioneered by none other than the feminists. They complain that “conviction rates” for rape accusations are too low and demand more convictions to increase the rate — regardless of the evidence in particular cases. They know that large numbers of citizens, whose cases they have not examined, are guilty of crimes. So in this, as in so many respects, we can thank the feminists for introducing innovative methods of authoritarianism.

The Real Indictment Against Kamala Harris

She may be a buffoon, but she has played the system that we permitted to operate in order to ascend to disturbing heights of power.

by Stephen Baskerville (August 2024)

The surreal prospect of Kamala Harris as a major party presidential candidate—and before that possibly the president of us all—offers irresistible temptations to the satirists and those who laugh to keep from crying. Her shallow philosophizing and word salads have filled us all with, shall we say, amusement (at least until now). Not since Dan Quayle has any VP or public figure offered such a tempting target for ridicule (and he was an intelligent man, as it turns out, whose bravery in stating unpopular truths has been vindicated).

I will resist the temptation and risk ruining everyone’s fun by posing a serious question: How did this hopeless mediocrity rise so high in American public life? Being a politician’s mistress offers one alluring explanation, but the real reason is more sobering. It is precisely the one that she herself has been playing up, but it is also the same reason why so many mediocrities wield so much power in Washington and across America: she was a prosecutor.

In US politics, this is now the foolproof career path to power: from prosecutor to district attorney, to state attorney general, to governor, and from there on up to Congress and beyond. This says something serious indeed about American politics and specifically about the current regime’s capacity to inflict so many disasters in so many places at once.

If one common denominator connects the otherwise perplexing assortment of crimes and catastrophes of the last 4 years, it is the mischief of prosecutors, former prosecutors, quasi-prosecutors, would-be prosecutors, and a citizenry habituated to farming out its civic responsibilities to lawyers of all kinds, the most deadly of whom are prosecutors.

Prosecutors and other judicial entrepreneurs have had their fingers in most of the pies, whether by commission or omission: from the Covid lockdowns to the BLM-Antifa riots, to the lawless cities, open borders, election-rigging, the security and law-enforcement apparat fabricating hoaxes like “Russiagate,” the false-flag and lawfare operations against Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and peaceful protesters on January 6, and even war in Ukraine.[1]

Critics like Tulsi Gabbard launch sensational attacks accusing Harris of being a bad prosecutor. But like all politicians who are themselves products of the system, Gabbard covers up more than she reveals. The litany of injustices she attributes to Harris is nothing out of the ordinary; all prosecutors routinely do the same and worse. Harris herself almost gloats about it:

America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice. I know this history well—of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people of color without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law.

The scandal here is not one or a few rogue prosecutors but our penchant for electing public office-holders whose foremost qualifications and proudest achievements consist of using any devices at their disposal to transfer as much of the population as possible into America’s vast archipelago of prisons.

Harris is simply the reductio ad absurdum of a tendency that is not limited to ideologues from the Left. More polished and plausible political operators use similar maneuvers to betray our trust by their fecklessness or perfidy, including conservative Republicans.

I realize that some conservatives believe that the only problem with prosecutors is that they do not lock up more people. Harris is now exploiting this simplistic thinking, repackaging herself as “fearless” on crime. But this is equally part of the danger she represents, because the corollary to leniency for the guilty is punishment of the innocent. Both devices and more constitute the larger menace: the legal industry’s capacity for proliferating the criminality it claims to be combating.

The Soros-bankrolled hacks who allow dangerous criminals to devastate our cities and terrorize urban dwellers, while targeting law-abiding citizens for criminal prosecution and persecution, and who engineered the “lawfare” operations against Trump and his supporters with draconian prison sentences, are only the most visible variations on the theme. Soros is simply mobilizing and directing attack dogs that are already well-trained and available to be unleashed.

The criminalization of America has been ongoing for decades.[2]  In the “assembly-line justice” meted out by most criminal courts, hearings last a matter of minutes, when young men, for the most part, are sentenced to months or years in prison and consigned to lives of intermittent incarceration, poverty, and homelessness from which it is almost impossible to escape.

But those processed by criminal courts are often set on the path to both criminalization and criminality by operations of probate courts, administrative courts, family courts, and all kinds of newfangled specialty courts that operate beneath the media radar screen and adeptly generate business for themselves by creating criminals to prosecute.

Why is this permitted, decade-after-decade, until it reaches the point where it determines our political outcomes?

We allow this because it mostly operates upon disfavored sectors of society, those we assume to be natural or inevitable criminals—those whose lives most of us are content to see consigned to regimes of systematic injustice, believing it will never touch us. The largest group is young, low-income black males.

While this social sector does have serious problems of violent criminality (which cries out for serious examination), young black men are not born criminals.  Their own career path to criminalization-criminality is the corollary of the prosecutors.’ It is orchestrated and choreographed by functionaries who inhabit a legal-political underworld that is too dreary for most people to notice, but it is supervised by judicial river rats like Kamala Harris.

To understand this, we should start by realizing that young black men today are far less likely to be incarcerated for violent crime than for unpaid child support. (Or for drug-dealing, which is driven by child support because the penalties for selling drugs are less harsh than those for not paying child support.) This is because most young black men, even those who populate the prisons, are not violent criminals or criminals at all. They are interned for failing to perform their role as latter-day slaves to labor for the vast welfare state-within-a-state, whose penal component is represented by Harris.

This is the bread-and-butter for huge numbers of entry-level prosecutors and prosecutrices, as well as for the ringmasters of the circus, the attorneys general—occupations and offices sustained largely by the systematic incarceration of young black men (and increasingly others). Putting these men in the pokey is now a major growth industry, employing increasing numbers of young black women.

Those raised watching courtroom dramas like “Perry Mason” may believe that prosecuting is a skill demanding a modicum of forensic finesse. But prosecuting allegedly unpaid child support is so formulaic and demands so little intelligence that even Kamala Harris can do it. A robotic prosecutor simply shows some meaningless numbers to an equally robotic judge (both of whose salaries come from child-support collections), who issues an order locking up the next dozen.

Needless to say, quaint niceties like “due process of law” play no part in this legal underworld. No trials or convictions are required, and no record will likely even be found specifying the terms of their internment.[3]

Demand for cadres of these procuratorial simpletons is generated by politicians who have preceded them up the political career ladder, principally attorneys general and governors.  The state attorney general is the key office for amassing government revenue from child-support collections and also serves as the stepping-stone to governorships and other higher office.[4]

You can readily see how Harris personifies this dynamic. If you want to understand why we are confronted today with the specter of President Kamala Harris, it is because we have provided these opportunities to her ilk. She has risen through the ranks by exploiting the mechanisms for systematically sending massive numbers of youth to populate the already gargantuan American prison gulag.

Ever since the pseudo-reform of welfare under the Clintons, child support has been marketed as a wholesome crusade to force “deadbeat dads” to pay for the children they have sired and “abandoned.” In fact, it is a cynical, money-making bureaucratic scam that scavenges the families decimated by welfare, confiscates their wealth for the state, and proliferates and entrenches the very poverty it claims to alleviate. Worse, it gives politicians a financial interest in dissolving as many families as possible, because they can raise revenue and build careers through child-support collections. This explains why the permanent immiseration of black America never abates but only worsens and why it is rapidly spreading to other communities: The politicians ensure that it does.

Crucially, this includes not only ultra-leftists like Harris, complaining about the “racism” of the justice system, but self-described “family-values” Republicans like Senator Josh Hawley. It is difficult to say whose hypocrisy is more cynical.

Like welfare itself, the child-support machinery it generated subsidizes single motherhood, facilitating and proliferating it. By evicting fathers from their homes and forcing them to pay for their children through the state machinery (they are not permitted to give the money directly to the mother or children), state governments collect vast amounts of operating revenue. But more, the fathers who are criminalized by their inability to pay the crushing sums must endure the further tragedy and humiliation of seeing their sons—deprived of the fathers who are the greatest factor for stability in their lives—become real criminals and therefore additional fodder for the prosecuting industry. The same enforcement machinery that criminalizes the fathers ensures that a large proportion of their father-deprived children end up as violent criminals, addicts, dropouts, prostitutes, and otherwise dysfunctional people. This is how the prosecutors—and judges and others in the judicial oligarchy—keep themselves in business and grow its operations.[5]

That enterprise is now large enough and wields enough political clout to place one of its own in the presidency and impede her rivals with lawfare attacks.[6]

Whether she wins or loses the presidential contest, the legal-political cesspool that threw up Kamala will continue to grow and breed unprincipled political characters who despise and hijack  justice for their own purposes, until we ourselves summon the determination to refrain from pointing our own fingers of accusation at obvious villains, and fingers of laughter at obvious clowns, and get our own political house in order.

[1] From the start, international judicatures, most notably the International Criminal Court, have endeavored to insert themselves into the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with threats of criminal prosecution and rulings that are determined by political calculations and that make it clear that they are political players whose first priority is not legal justice but maximizing their influence in the international competition for power.

The legalistic framework is adopted even by non-jurists.  Just as domestic political opponents are pursued as criminals on the thinnest of pretexts, even thinner pseudo-judicial procedures are mobilized against international adversaries.  “I have determined,” declares Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, “that members of Russia’s forces and other Russian officials have committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.”  This “determination” was seconded by Harris.  Those who thought that the “rule of law” required that determinations of criminal guilt be made by courts, weighing evidence and observing due process of law, can be forgiven for being perplexed at how politicians can issue declarations of guilt or innocence, proceeding from an omniscience that is sufficiently infallible to establish others’ criminal culpability and based not on standard definitions of crime or rules of evidence but on how those parties conduct public and foreign policy.   Here too, one might wonder if similar standards of justice guided Harris during her career as a criminal prosecutrix.   “Crimes Against Humanity in Ukraine”, State Department press statement, 18 February 2023, https://www.state.gov/crimes-against-humanity-in-ukraine.  In the international context, accused “criminals” face an even lower burden of proof than those accused in domestic political contexts; see John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (Pluto, 2007).

[2] For references to journalists and scholars who have investigated this in depth, see chapter 3 of my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It (Arktos, 2024).

[3] Conservatives now complain about practices like “predawn, no-knock raids and circus arrests before awaiting media (to whom time and place of said arrest have been pre-leaked).”  But they did not complain when this technique was pioneered by child-support enforcement – they applauded – so now they too have become its targets.  Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” in Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of Decay, ed. Arthur Milikh (Encounter, 2023), 3.

[4] How state governments and politicians profit financially by intentionally proliferating fatherless children and collecting the resulting child support – which funds general government operations — is explained in my book, Who Lost America?  Not accidentally, attorneys general now spearhead campaigns to curtail parents’ rights elsewhere.  “Sixteen State Attorneys General File Brief Opposing Parents’ Rights,” Daily Citizen, 3 July 2023, https://dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/sixteen-state-attorneys-genera....  Here too, we were warned.  See John Gizzi, “State Attorneys General: A National Association of Aspiring Governors,” Capital Research Center, September 2005.

https://fvdinternational.com/article/keir-and-kamala-cut-from-the-same-cloth

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

BY ROBERT BRIDGE

Why Kamala Harris won’t sit for an interview
How did the media make a national hero out of the current vice president, even though she never gave a single interview as a candidate?

The US media has once and for all proven that it is in the pocket of the Democratic Party. It continues to fawn over the greatly flawed Kamala Harris while the presidential candidate has steadfastly refused to do interviews or press conferences for weeks.

Taking the lead in this media-backed coup d’état is Time magazine, whose latest issue features a powerful portrait of Kamala Harris on the cover bearing the glowing caption “Her Moment.”Unfortunately, it wasn’t ‘her moment’ for a little chat with the media, although it was certainly the perfect opportunity.

In one of the only lines of criticism against Harris in the 3,000-word puff piece, Time writer Charlotte Alter admitted that “Harris has yet to do a single substantive interview or to explain her policy shifts.”Shockingly, Harris even refused a single comment to Time, despite offering gratuitous promotion of the vice president. That speaks volumes about Harris, who refuses to speak to a publication that is absolutely committed to providing kid-glove treatment to the Democrats.

Alter’s description of Harris provided little substance on the vice president’s track record and oceans of ink spewing vacuous allusions to the carnivalesque atmosphere that now accompanies Harris’ political rallies. Many have suggested that this is the only way she is able to fill stadiums and inject a feeling of enthusiasm.

The soundtrack suggested a Beyoncé concert,” Alter opened in the very first paragraph of her article titled ‘The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris’.

“The light-up bracelets evoked the Eras Tour. And the exuberant crowd – more than 14,000 strong, lining up in the rain – resembled the early days of Barack Obama.”

The name Taylor Swift, certainly no political scientist, popped up several paragraphs later: “More than 38,000 people registered on Vote.org in the 48 hours after she became the presumptive nominee, eclipsing the voter-registration surge encouraged by Taylor Swift last year.”

And if that wasn’t enough, Alter came up with this ridiculous allusion to Hollywood starlets in an effort to explain Harris’ inexplicable rise: “Mass enthusiasm for a woman is nothing new: Harris’s run comes just a year after the blockbuster summer of Barbie, Beyoncé, and Swift.”

Finally, Time provided an absurd quote from Senator Cory Booker, who invoked Star Wars imagery to argue that Harris has “mastered the art of ‘arm twisting’ required to pass major legislation” for Democrats. “She has gone,” he said, “from being a Padawan to a Jedi master.” Too bad the force was not with Harris when it came to securing the southern border, or helping working class Americans survive some of the worst inflation the US has experienced in decades.

Compare all of that mindless puffery to Donald Trump, who Time interviewed for a cover story in April that was an 83-minute read, while the nitpicking factchecking following the piece took over 20 minutes to digest. Eric Cortellessa, the journalist who conducted the interview, asked Trump a dozen questions about the Trump prosecutions, five questions about the January 6 ‘insurrection’, four on battling the ‘deep state’, three on his “dictator for a day” joke, two about the possibility of right-wing violence if Trump loses the election, and four on whether he’d seek to overturn the 22nd Amendment to serve a third term in office.

It seems that the only reason Trump agrees to sit through these tortuous liberal inquisitions is to have the ability to say he is doing what Kamala Harris conspicuously refuses to do – talk to the media. Whether this strategy will work in his favor is highly debatable given the overwhelming support Harris receives regardless of what she does or doesn’t do. Yet even the Democrats must understand that the media are the gatekeepers to our aspiring politicians. Without the ability of journalists to sit down and grill officials on policy matters, the American people will remain in the dark.

Moreover, sitting in the media hot seat allows the audience to determine if a person has the mettle required for leadership. Many believe that Harris, who has demonstrated an inability to convey complex ideas – ‘word salads’, as they’ve been called – without the assistance of a teleprompter, is perfectly aware of her personal shortcomings, and that is why she is content to remain in the shadows while the media pumps her up into a political tour de force.

This could also explain why the Democrats waited until the 11th hour to replace feebleminded Joe Biden with Harris on the presidential ticket – the less time the American people have to listen to Harris’ convoluted arguments (and grating cackle), the better.

The rise of Harris from basement-level popularity ratings just four years ago to some sort of political genius proves the undeniable power of the corporate media complex to turn the greatest mediocrity into anyone they like.

“The way the US corporate media transformed Kamala Harris from a national embarrassment to a transformative pioneer overnight – without even pretending to care about anything that she thinks or believes – is a powerful testament to how potent the science of propaganda is,” journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on X (formerly Twitter).

The same thing could be said when the media argued in one homogenous voice that Biden was “sharp as a tack” following his disastrous debate against Trump. More shockingly, however, is how so many Americans were deluded by this assessment of Biden’s performance due to media spin. This shows that even the most intelligent people are susceptible to becoming malleable play things in the hands of the mainstream media, whose primary goal is not to inform its listeners, but to simply brainwash them. After all, they don’t call it ‘programming’ for nothing.

Trump and Harris are set to debate on ABC on September 10, an event that the former president, barring some unforeseen disaster, has essentially already won. The final result, however, will depend on whether the audience will side with the snake-oil media and ‘believe their lying ears’, or will they be able to think past their media mind controllers and make an honest judgement of Harris’ performance. The future of the United States hinges on that question.

https://www.rt.com/news/602872-us-kamala-harris-interview/

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

On the liberal Left, we consider ourselves above judging people by their appearance. We don’t presume to know what a person will or won’t do because they are Black or a woman. But as we learned from the Obama presidency, where we all hoped he would bring the global war on terror to a close, he expanded it – and his successors have done nothing to change course.

The sudden spate of pro-Harris memes flooding our news feeds and minds since Biden left the presidential race have been professional and unrelenting. Equally remarkable has been the thoughtless sharing of those memes by self-declared anti-war advocates on the liberal Left. Kamala Harris has been nominated, endorsed and promoted to the position of Democratic candidate for US presidency without having placed a single policy anywhere on her website. Just a bio, fundraising solicitations and merch. She is indeed an historic candidate. Historic in the shocking lack of scrutiny she’s been subject to.

A recent meme likens Harris’s leadership to that of Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist. Parks fought for what was right. Harris’s support of forever wars is wrong. Surely Parks did not sit so Harris could continue the genocide in Palestine or nuclear brinkmanship in Ukraine? The conflation of the two images and individuals is premature at best.

But the liberal Left argues vehemently, as though their lives (or at least their very identity) depended on it, that she must be elected. A key argument has essentially focused on the fact that she is a Black woman. If only being Black, as well as female, bestowed moral insight and fortitude! Consider Condoleezza Rice, who was at the helm during the great US/Iraq WMD debacle. Being a woman of any colour does not automatically bestow enlightenment and courage. Think Margaret Thatcher, who ushered in the neoliberalism that we all suffer from today.

There are also numerous examples of women from the progressive side of politics who have pursued US hegemony with little regard for morality. Hillary Clinton, a well-loved Democrat, famously sanctioned the state murder of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi with the words, “We came, we saw, he died.” More recently, Angela Merkel was caught lying about her commitment to an international bipartisan agreement in the Minsk II accords when she admitted that it was indeed a tactic to buy time to arm Ukraine.

While it’s always hopeful to see a woman in leadership, we must judge them on their track record, not their demographics or personality. Judging people by the colour of their skin or gender is abhorrent. On this we, on the Left, presumably all agree.

But judgment by personality is precisely where we’re led when our political ideas are curated online, without further reading. Our Liberal tendencies of equity and diversity can so easily be manipulated, opening us up to being intensely propagandised. When asked to defend the promotion of Harris through their sharing of pro-Harris memes, friends suggest Harris has become a supporter of the Palestinians.

While politically astute in perhaps distancing herself from Biden and his abhorrent views on Israel, continuing to advocate for “Israel’s right to defend itself” and the need to “defeat Hamas” are the catchcries of the Israel/US genocide – they are not the words of a friend of the Palestinians.

Some would argue that Obama was an intentional focus on colour, a PR exercise by the establishment following the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the US’s tarnished reputation both domestically and internationally. Promoted as the hope for a peaceful future and hailed as the first Black president, he promised much, only to become one of the worst perpetrators of what are now known as the Forever Wars.

Following the invasion of Gaza and the US’s complete loss of a moral compass, Harris appears to be following that same PR strategy. Despite an appalling track record while holding high office, as outlined by Caleb Maupin in his 2020 book, Kamala Harris and the Future of America, Harris is hailed as the voice of sanity, reason, and tolerance for diversity.

If nothing else, all this reminds us of one thing: the need to critically assess potential leaders beyond superficial attributes such as skin colour or gender. Despite the subtle (and often not-so-subtle) stream of constant messaging from the media, track records and political associations need to be examined. From here we can discern the long-time political allegiances that are likely to play out in any presidency. Based on her track record, it does not seem likely that Harris will be the one to turn the monolith that is the American empire around. If anything, her allegiances suggest that they, with her help, will steer the ship down. Yet, we will be encouraged to believe that she, complete in her Super Woman suit, has arrived just in time to save us.

“Since it was impossible to change the politics of the system, it became necessary to change the type – or stereotype – of the person in charge of carrying out the policy.” – Fidel Castro, in Obama and the Empire, 2012.

As Castro insightfully noted in his reflection on the Obama presidency, it is crucial to recognise that merely changing the face of leadership does not inherently translate to meaningful change in policy or morality. While diverse representation is essential, we cannot betray our Liberal values by judging a book by its cover, or by reference to “stereotype”.

Instead of focusing our attention on the “liberal,” it may be time to shine a light on the “Hawk” part of Harris. If not, our support for a liberal may well encourage us to be more forgiving than we would otherwise be, potentially opening the door to even greater atrocities.

So yes. Let’s share. Let’s share the memes and the facts. But not just the convenient ones that cast her in an angelic “liberal” light. We don’t need to propagandise ourselves. Shilling for Harris before genuinely scrutinising her track record belies the value of critical thinking that defines the liberal Left. The messaging seems to be driving us to focus on the “liberal” aspects of Harris. At this time in history, it is more important than ever to think critically and focus on the “Hawk”.

https://johnmenadue.com/a-liberal-hawk-is-a-hawk-nonetheless-time-to-focus-less-on-the-liberal-more-on-the-hawk/

KAMALA IS A PRODUCT OF THE NEOCONS, LIKE JOE BIDEN WAS....

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