The Intersectional Candidate
DEI’s chickens come home to roost
By Micah E. Weiss
One of my absurdist instincts is to enjoy with as much black humor as possible the excesses of our political system, regardless of consequence. Who remembers Dan Quayle? He was my adolescent crash course in head-shaking “Only in America. . .” macabre political fun. Then Dubya, Sarah Palin, and, of course, the capstone of all political jokes, Donald J. Trump, who I admit I was unable to enjoy on his humorous merits until after I stopped crying long after the 2016 election. That may or may not have been sometime last year, but I don’t recall the exact date.
The point is, when that orange faced land mammal struts in front of a camera with that arrogant grim-faced lip-pout preceding him by several minutes, when his strange cadence of language, meat-head syntax, and multi-syllabic word allergy speeches burble out of his bile-filled spleen-vent of a mouth, and he pulls that cocky eyebrow thing and head pivot he no doubt thinks gives him an air of gravitas, I am now able to smile and ask myself and the world: what country is great enough to produce this abomination? I defy even Canada to produce a politician this extraordinary!
And yet, there I was, sitting on the couch next to my sleeping father watching the Presidential debate on the TV when I witnessed our sitting President, a man I voted for, say this last Thursday:
Biden: What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.
For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period.
We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.
Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.
And then there was this exchange:
Biden: What I’ve done – since I’ve changed the law, what’s happened? I’ve changed it in a way that now you’re in a situation where there are 40 percent fewer people coming across the border illegally. It’s better than when he left office. And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the – the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.
Moderator: President Trump?
TRUMP: I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.
As it stands now, the game is more or less over, and former President Trump is pretty well positioned to become future President Trump.
It is clear that President Biden should no longer be President, and barely anyone is disputing that. Various newspaper editorial boards, public intellectuals, Cable and Social Media commentators, and even some congressional Democrats are calling for him to drop out of the race, and some (I would be in this camp) think he should resign immediately from office. If I were Putin or Xi Jingping right now, I’d be licking my chops after watching that debate and putting together a plan to exploit our lack of leadership in the waning months of this year. However, what awaits us all on deck is the most unpopular politician in America today: Vice President Harris.
When Harris entered the race for the presidency back in 2020, I got pretty excited. A former District Attorney from San Francisco with a tough reputation, then California’s Attorney General. She seemed to be a hard-nosed, down-to-earth centrist with some left-leaning views, but nothing extreme. A one-woman melting pot, she could tack to the center and avoid the harshest critiques from the identity left, or so I hoped. Then she became a candidate for president, and she became not a wonky, smart, capable, tough-talking former DA ready to bring common sense to the wide field of candidates, but instead she turned into the BLACK WOMAN CANDIDATE, hitting Biden with a double race card at the first debate. Apparently, Biden once said something nice about a long-dead Senator who was a segregationist long before Biden got to the Senate. And also, that Biden was against a Federal busing mandate from the Department of Education (an idea so popular almost no districts practice it anymore). To the former, Harris claimed that Biden’s comments on the dead-Senator were “hurtful” and “personal” to her. To the latter, she said: “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me!” And all of America collectively cringed. Six months and $40+ million later, she withdrew from the race as she stumbled over incoherence to an ignominious slide into candidate obscurity.
Then Biden elevated her to be his running mate in one of the most pandering moves to the Indentitarian Left I had ever seen, and she stayed the BLACK WOMAN CANDIDATE, riding Biden’s normie coattails to the Vice Presidency. Huzzah! She continued to flog identity politics in her speeches at the behest of the Biden administration whenever they needed their House Slave to perform tricks for them.
Probably the greatest example of the craven use of Harris, not as the accomplished political and intellectual force that she should have been, or at least could have been, but as merely a totem for racial divisiveness, was when she was sent to Florida to attack one line in the state standards on Black history in K-12 public school curricula.
The line in question was: “How slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied to their personal benefit.” Anyone who has ever read a slave narrative–and I have read and taught several, and studied them in college; anyone who has taught the horrible history of slavery–as I have these last ten years, can tell you that that sentence is 100% accurate, and speaks to the resilience, ingenuity, and talent of slaves in America as they took every advantage they could get to survive, thrive, and escape from bondage. That one line is a testament to the endurance and strength of many, as Frederick Douglass might prove, as he learned to read from his slave mistress and turned that skill not just to his own benefit, but to the benefit of every American lucky enough to read the eloquence of his words that helped abolish slavery then, and inspire us now.
The Biden administration had a different interpretation. They looked around, saw their BLACK WOMAN Vice President, and sent her down to Florida to civilize the natives. In a fiery speech, Harris declared that unnamed Florida standards writers were “extremists” pushing “revisionist history“ where “middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery. They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us and we will not stand for it.” Yes, Kamala, you are very brave.
Dr. William B. Allen, who was in the working group that came up with the standards, was asked to respond to Harris’s charges, and put it perfectly well and succinctly: “The very idea that the sentence that was being quoted refutes the charges being made against it, should make it unnecessary for anyone to have to speak out about it. Grammar, for people of basic literacy, sufficiently refutes the charge.”
I certainly can’t assume that Harris is so stupid that she misinterpreted that line, so I must assume the only other alternative–that she’s a fraud, a race-baiting phony for whom the truth means nothing. Thus it has stood for almost four years. If there is an identity-based culture war to fight, they send out Harris to fight it.
Can we blame her? It’s a good question. I am of a mind to pity her position. She is a woman of talent and industry, hard working and intelligent, who rose in the ranks of DAs to State AG, then Senator of the largest state in the union, and then was encouraged to run for President. It's a tough racket, and when all the dopes and dingleberries in your campaign office tell you some version of the following story: “the field is full of centrists and leftists, the only thing that makes you different is your skin color and genitals, so go with that!” I expect most people would listen. But to let it consume her so thoroughly, that is the tragedy. This is, of course, why DEI is so grotesque, because it makes victims out of heroes, pulling the weak from the strong, spinning gold back into straw. In 2018, Kamala Harris was an accomplished prosecutor, attorney general, a United States Senator, and one of the most badass black women in America, but by the time she ran for president, she was just another poor little black girl sitting on a bus nursing her tender hurt feelings.
Well, thanks to the way things went at the debate, we need the Kamala Harris who never got a chance to exist, while Biden is in a double bind, as the Orange Wildebeest looms. Kamala Harris was not selected to be intelligent, capable, or tough–she was selected to be an intersectional checklist. As such, the Biden administration, with Harris’s own collaboration, crafted her into one of the most unpopular people in American politics. She is why “representation” is not and should not be an end in and of itself.
Now that Harris is who she has become, the Biden administration and the entire Democratic party establishment know she can’t win any more than Biden can. Biden can’t resign in favor of Harris, because it’s only a lateral shift. Neither can he nor the Democratic Party ask Harris to step aside in favor of a candidate who might stand a chance, because they were the ones that canonized her as the FIRST BLACK WOMAN SOUTH-ASIAN LEFTHANDED COLORBLIND FIVE FOOT TWO INCH TALL PERSON WITH A UTERUS AND A SLIGHT MOLE ON HER ELBOW Vice President. If they even try to drop her, they run the risk of insulting every intersectional category they couldn’t stop flogging her to be, or at least anyone in those categories who thinks being in that category is important, which unfortunately happens to be the left wing base. Had the Biden campaign and administration managed her more quietly, had the identitarian left not been so bloody powerful, had they let her be a centrist the way she started out, they could have accentuated her legal acumen and mastery of criminal justice issues, had her work with Merrick Garland, perhaps redefining the role of VP, or had her speak with expertise on more Supreme Court case rulings than just Dobbs. They could have built up her reputation for competence, intelligence, and hard-nosed lawyering.
But it's too late now, maybe–the DEI chickens have come home to roost, to use race-baiter Jeremiah Wright’s phrase. An appropriate throw-back, I think, back in 2007, when Obama really became a candidate. He was moving right along, his policy details bland, his rhetoric inspiring, his candidacy really starting to move, when that Reverend Wright tape came out with the man at the pulpit spewing bile and hatred at America just days after 9/11, and Obama had the chance to be a candidate, or a BLACK candidate. In the finest moment of his campaign, he chose the former. In that speech, known as the “More Perfect Union” speech, Obama said the following:
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction — a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people — that, working together, we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.
Kamala Harris didn’t make that choice; she chose the racial stalemate from the outset of her national political career. And now, it will cost her a shot at the Presidency in a moment of crisis. That choice will also cost us all. The DEI stalemate has all but cut off any pathway to any other candidate but the corpse of Biden.
And lo! Another four years looms of the Grim Faced Goon from Mar-a-Lago–the lumbering blowhard the likes of which even the French could not produce. Our own Frankenstein's monster, rising from the depravities of our domestically created TV genre, reality TV, for entertainment purposes only, we thought. But here he comes again, and that little hurt black girl on the bus just isn’t any match for him.