What Would a Kamala Harris Presidency Look Like?
The specter of woke totalitarianism.
The “surge.”
First things first. We’ve been reading (unless you’re wiser than I am and turned off “the news”) about the Kamala Harris “surge” that has disrupted what would probably have been a landslide victory for Trump in November, a victory so decisive that election theft wouldn’t have been a credible option no matter how many mail-in ballots, or motor-voter chicaneries, or people voting from addresses that turn out to be empty lots there were.
Keep in mind that after the past four years — heck, after the past 40 years — anyone who takes anything “legacy” (corporate) media says at face value needs to have his head examined. If MSNBC or CNN or ABC or NBC or Politico or NPR tell me it’s a full moon tonight, I’m going to open the shades and look for myself.
So how much of this “surge” even exists outside media puffery.
Well, what we know is that hundreds of millions of dollars have flown into Kamala’s war chest since Dementia Joe succumbed to the “pressure” — possibly it was more than that — from powerful Democrats to end his candidacy. Kamala clearly has the backing of the Establishment: corporate media, Hollywood and much of Silicon Valley, academia, and obviously the People’s Republics of Massachusetts and New York – Asylum on the Potomac power corridor.
That’s what I’m going by.
What I’ve been saying all along: powerful people don’t want a second Trump presidency. They can’t control him, and they know it. Moreover, he won’t make the same mistakes this go round.
Kamala, on the other hand, will do as she’s told, just like Joe did. Since she owes every position she’s ever held to Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) policies, she’s arguably not bright enough to do otherwise.
Presidency-by-Committee
The first thing about a Kamala Harris presidency, therefore, is that it would be a presidency-by-committee. The committee would likely consist of the Obamas, the Clintons, Pelosi, Schumer (perhaps) — with George Soros and Larry Fink (BlackRock’s megabillionaire CEO) somewhere in the background — and probably others whose names we don’t know. Arch-globalists all.
This isn’t new. Given Joe’s now-recognized cognitive decline — which Kamala helped to hide — we’ve had presidency-by-committee since January 21, 2021. It was the committee who told him, “you’re done.”
What will be new is the difficulty hiding this feature of a leftist-led, dumbed down political system servicing globalism-on-steroids while simultaneously trying to avoid blowing up the world in a major war.
Kamala’s VP pick, Tim Walz, checks almost all the hard-left boxes: he’s pro-abort, supports men pretending to be women, is pro-BLM. He let Minneapolis burn during the George Floyd riots. He drew the line at defunding the police, suggesting a spark of something between his ears. But then again, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness” is his oft-repeated venture into breathtaking stupidity.
No great expectations here, therefore. Walz is no more qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency than Kamala has been. This assessment is possible without even considering doubts a few Republicans have raised about his military service.
The long and the short of it: this would be the most hard left presidency-by-committee in U.S. history: more of a DIE administration than Obama’s or Biden’s ever thought of being. We could definitely expect to see more men pretending to be women holding cabinet positions, and you’d not be allowed to ask questions.
Some conservatives have spoken of “woke totalitarianism.” Let’s explore this notion a bit.
Woke Totalitarianism.
Many of us, back in the day — for me it was the early 1990s — underestimated the cultural power the hard left had even then. This power is based on emotion, not reason. It is also based on the Platonist idea that some are most fit to rule others. This is a powerful psychological motivator in some personality types who identify with power-elitism and believe they should be allowed to dictate terms to unwashed peasants. And to enlist as many of the latter as possible to further their own enslavement to agendas, via “virtue-signaling” or worse.
Wokism built on this. It incorporated the Hegelian master-slave dichotomy and the Marxian notion that the “wrong masters” have been in charge all this time. Hence the incipient call for revolution characteristic of all forms of Marxism, of which wokism is just the latest variant. After the revolution, the philosopher-kings will be in charge: intellectual-activists ready to impose, willy nilly, their vision of Utopia. This, too, is a Platonist idea (it is central to Plato’s major dialogue The Republic).
Marx placed the working class, “the proletariat” (Hegelian slaves, opposed to their “bourgeois” masters) on a pedestal, but neither he nor Engels nor Lenin nor Stalin not Trotsky ever worked at a “proletariat” job in their lives. They would never have deigned to interact with the rabble. Hence they had no clue how real working people think. The Frankfurt School Marxists figured out that the real proletariat don’t want to overthrow the bourgeoisie but join it, or have their children join it, through enterprise and hard work. That motivated the Frankfurt School shift from economics to culture, advocated separately by Italian communist Gramsci, begin their “long march through the institutions.” This is why we speak of cultural Marxism as the foundation of wokism.
One ingredient was missing, though, and Marcuse supplied it in the 1960s. He replaced class with race. His proteges added gender, sexual preference, and world religions except for Christianity which cultural Marxism sought to destroy. Since too much of the working class was white, male, and Christian, the increasingly cultural Marxist Democrat Party kicked them under the bus — helped greatly by corporate globalism that sent their jobs to China.
Naturally they voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and will be voting for him this year.
The academically-trained, and media wokesters, fancy themselves as our era’s philosopher-kings, “understanding” as they do the “problems” of hidden “systemic racism,” “the patriarchy,” “gender as a social construction,” “transphobia,” etc., etc., while defending “reproductive freedoms” (i.e., the freedom to kill the unborn).
Academic wokesters have all but destroyed American universities. If you don’t believe me, watch the video below, then realize that Portland State is just an extreme case of the sort of thing going on everywhere, even if in diluted forms, as woke Gen Z moves through college.
Academic wokesters are delusional, of course. Most owe their voices to the agendas they serve, which is itself subordinate to the greater agenda, that of corporate globalism. As people able to get anything useful done, few could set up and run a hot dog stand much less guide a civilization.
The real would-be philosopher-kings are in the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tavistock Institute, etc.; and in corporate octopuses like BlackRock, Vanguard, etc. These arms and branches of the Global Corporatocracy have considerably more resources to throw into their projects than a bunch of woke academics who serve to distract the public with gosh-gee-whiz stuff at the former’s pleasure. The real would-be philosopher-kings have thrown the bulk of their resources into leviathan financial institutions, political classes and technocratic bureaucracies, and corporate mass media to maintain financial and narrative control.
They won’t object to woke totalitarianism because it is a useful control instrument. It is useful because, obviously, in a woke environment being branded a racist can be career-ending: unless you have the ingenuity (and the personal financial resources) of a Tucker Carlson you’re canceled and might as well not exist.
Hence we see the U.K’s new Labour Party regime trying to repress the anti-immigration / anti open borders mass protests by demonizing racists and far right extremists. British citizens can now be handed jail sentences for posting or even reposting politically incorrect, anti-immigration social media posts on X. This regime has even threatened Elon Musk, X’s owner, with legal action even though he’s nowhere near the U.K. (as has the equally globalist EU).
As Aaron and Melissa Dykes (proprietors of Truthstream Media) observe in this crucially important video I hope readers will watch when we get done here, if you don’t have free speech, you don’t have any other freedoms. Which explains why the battle on campuses on our side of the Atlantic is fundamentally a battle over who can say what.
The woke totalitarians are those who would not just crush free speech but modify language in such a way that protesting their agendas would be impossible. They’ve done this (as I’ve noted previously) many times, using invented concepts like homophobia and transphobia which aren’t real phobias in any clinical, scientific sense at all. One of the signs of a woke totalitarian is how they throw around words like hate speech and harm but never define them. They want safe spaces free from microaggressions.
We can speak of woke totalitarianism because wokism is ultimately about obedience. Control over language means thought control. And woe unto dissidents. It is still fortunate that in the U.S., at least, the anti-woke still have avenues they can explore after they’ve been fired from jobs by woke universities or woke corporations. Free speech isn’t yet illegal in the U.S., although exercising it can cost you your career and your reputation. I’m sure, however, that under a Kamala Harris / Tim Walz regime, the woke will go to work on criminalizing it.
This should give us a good idea of what a Kamala Harris - Tim Walz presidency-by-committee will look like if it is allowed to happen. Woke totalitarianism was exemplified in Canada’s WEF Young Global Leader president Justin Trudeau ordering the freezing of bank accounts of truckers who protested plandemic policies back in 2022.
This brings us to what the real elites, the real would-be philosopher-kings want, which I’ve enumerated many times before. They don’t care how many men pretending to be women there are in women’s sports or government, although if enough such agents of chaos are around, and made highly visible through, e.g., participation in the Olympics where they sow discord and confusion, this helps the real power elites in the Global Corporatocracy. The real war, again, is being waged on those of us who want to worship God, live morally worthy and prosperous lives, take care of our families, contribute to our communities, and otherwise be left alone.
Philosopher-Kings and the Fallacies of Globalism and Multiculturalism.
Philosophy, etymologically, means the love of wisdom. Sadly, the academic subject might as well be dead. Its capacity to influence the public conversation for the better is nil, and for the most part, deservedly so.
To be wise surely includes wanting a better and more humane world. It also means recognizing our limitations in building such a world. We’re not God, and we’re not even close to being omniscient.
The truly wise therefore understand that national-level centralization cannot be made to work for everybody … much less global-scale centralization.
Why not?
Because while physical nature can conceivably be understood through the application of a few basic principles (typically expressed mathematically), this is not true of human societies. The kinds of principles that help us understand human nature, e.g., that human beings act consciously on their surroundings and don’t simply obey physical law, that every one of us is slightly different, and every one of us wants to be important.
We have our own quests we are on, and we don’t care if would-be elites approve or not.
Any legitimate social inquiry has as its subject matter the millions of anonymous people on their personal quests. This means enormous complexity. Complexity by definition cannot be planned, or planned for. It can only be interfered with, and those interferences inevitably cause far more problems than they solve.
The truly wise, therefore, will back off. They will recognize the natural rights of persons to live as they see fit in their communities, which usually means the right to adhere to the traditions of their forefathers such as family structures, traditions that have proven to work (to solve the problems of survival and political-economic organization) over time. They will understand that one of the bases of community is trust, via longstanding relationships, familial and professional: that (except for the occasional hermit) most people prefer to interact with those they know, like, and trust.
Coerced, elite-directed multiculturalism goes against this by opening borders and allowing into traditional societies (without asking them) populations consisting of mostly unknown quantities. No multicultural society based on elite-sponsored, top-down policy has ever remained stable and peaceful for any length of time. People naturally hesitate to interact with those who don’t speak their language or even recognize the legitimacy of their culture. At best, they hunker down. If it comes to it, they rebel. A murder of one or more natives by an immigrant or someone perceived as such will spark a mass rebellion. This is what we’re seeing in the U.K.
Peoples who differ from one another in fundamental ways but are forced to live under the same political roof tend to resent it. Consider Yugoslavia, which held together under Tito’s dictatorial control and then blew apart very quickly following his death. The region has been a tinderbox ever since.
Yet coerced multiculturalism is the official policy of the EU, and despite Brexit, of the U.K., and of the U.S. under the Democrat Party (and Establishment Republicans). Opponents of free migration across open borders are denounced — this is typical woke totalitarianism — as racists, or far-right extremists. This despite the fact, for fact it is, that free migration impoverishes and destroys the cohesiveness of neighborhoods, communities, civilizations — quite independently of any crime element. There is truth to the saying that if you import the third world, you become the third world.
There are ways peoples who are different can learn to forge relationships and build trust, but these take special leadership and communication skills, including good will which must be cultivated, further skill-building in those being led, and then the ultimate crucible which is time, freed of economic or other sources of disruption. Time, and freedom from disruption, are what we do not presently have in abundance. This process cannot be coerced, moreover. If opponents have to, they will engage in passive resistance by doing the absolute minimum in coerced-multicultural workplaces. They will stay indoors as their neighborhoods disintegrate.
A Kamala Harris – Tim Walz presidency-by-committee won’t get any of this, of course. Nor will its supporters nor people who will vote for such a presidency. (Neither will the left wing Keir Starmer regime in the U.K. get any of this; nor the Euro-crats in Brussels.)
Trump / MAGA probably gets some of it instinctively (though not enough).
The real elites in the real power centers (such as the City of London, and Basel and Davos, Switzerland; and possibly the Vatican) don’t care one way or the other, so long as their capacity to increase their global wealth and power increases. It’s important to keep this in mind going forward.
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Steven Yates is a (still recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself. In 2012 he moved to Chile. He is married to a Chilean national.
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Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
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