For Kamala Harris, America Is the ‘Scene of a Crime’

There’s an old joke involving the Lone Ranger and Tonto that reflects a profound truth about the nature of identity and teamwork. The duo is trapped, with a group of wild Indians bearing down on them. “Looks like we’re in trouble, Tonto,” says the Lone Ranger to his faithful friend. “What do you mean ‘we,’ paleface?” replies Tonto.

The Lone Ranger joke came to mind when watching Democrat presidential candidate and media favorite Kamala Harris speak about American history. She recently declared that Columbus Day should be changed to “Indigenous Peoples Day”:

People did not want to deal and accept and most importantly admit that we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country, and we have to be honest about that. If we are not honest, we are not going to deal with the vestiges of all of that harm, and we are not going to correct course, and we are not going to be true to our values and morals.

One wonders what the senator means by “we.” Kamala Harris has no connection to the historic American nation she so casually disowns. Neither of her parents was born in America, with one from India and one from Jamaica. Both came to this “crime scene” in the 1960s. Senator Harris spent much of her childhood in Canada and attended both Hindu and Christian religious services growing up. Her roots in the country she aspires to lead and transform are very shallow.

Her background is like that of former president Barack Obama, whose “black” identity and experience was very different from that of African-Americans descended from slaves. Just like “Barry” Obama did with blacks in Chicago, Senator Harris is associating herself with a history to which she has no real connection. Her participation in a late-night skit in which she declared “Wakanda Forever” when Black Panther premiered was cringeworthy pandering. Her identity is a political front, as illustrated recently when she said she supported marijuana legalization because she was Jamaican. In response, her own father denounced the “travesty” of the family’s “proud Jamaican identity” being used “in the pursuit of identity politics.”

The senator’s comment in her speech about “a lot of work to do” is a trope among politicians who constantly tell us America hasn’t quite reach the promised land of multicultural tolerance despite all the programs, payments, and indoctrination. There is no end to such “work.” If the goal is racial equality, the goal will never be reached. Ritual invocations about “work to do” are justifications for programs designed to redistribute wealth and opportunity from whites to non-whites, programs that have no end.

More ominous is what “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” really represents. The late Sam Francis wrote that the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday serves to:

[L]egitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions — not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth.

“Indigenous Peoples’ Day” is the next step. It delegitimizes the arrival of the European settlers who eventually created the Republic. The logical premise of “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” is that whites’ very presence in North America is illegitimate and they should be stripped of sovereignty and political control. This argument has already been made by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who declared that since America is simply “stolen land” and Hispanics — in her view — are “indigenous,” they deserve exemption from immigration laws and have more of a right to America than whites do. Kamala Harris’ comments echo this argument, especially her reference to those unnamed “people” — presumably reactionary whites — who don’t want to consider their country a crime scene.

When she declared her candidacy, Senator Harris said she was a “proud American.” If she thinks America is a “crime scene,” it’s unclear why she is proud. She may have been referring to the “values” and “morals” she invoked when talking about “Indigenous Peoples Day.”

Senator Harris’s “values” seem to be a collection of cliches, if her kickoff speech of the 2020 campaign is any indication:

The American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before. We must answer a fundamental question: who are we as Americans? So let’s answer that question — to the world, to each other, right here, right now. America, we are better than this.

Of course, this isn’t an answer. Senator Harris’s answer to the problem of American identity is simply to attack President Trump without naming him. “We have leaders who lie, bully, attack a free press, and undermine our democratic institutions,” she said. This doesn’t tell us “who we are”; it simply tells us who “we” are not. American identity is defined by opposing the president.

Yet this strategy only works if President Trump can be linked to something definitively not American, preferably a foreign enemy. Senator Harris has been among the most alarmist politicians protesting Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 election. She has accused President Trump of taking “Putin’s word over that of our intelligence community” and says her “highest priority” is protecting Robert Mueller’s investigation. Twitter is already banning “trolls” that criticize Senator Harris, and her most fervent supporters refer to her Twitter critics as Russian agents. Vanity Fair is among those amplifying a similar theory, with a sensational article entitled “Is Russia Already Messing With The 2020 Election?” Author Eric Lutz quotes several “experts” claiming the Kremlin is targeting Kamala Harris, among others. Vladimir Putin wants to divide Americans, the article warns, concluding that “under a president who has helped further those divisions, it seems the nation is as vulnerable as ever.” Of course, this suggests that America is not “strong” because of its cultural, racial, and ethnic divisions, but weak. A foreign adversary can easily take advantage of the fault lines within America’s diverse continental empire.

Senator Harris seems to admit this on occasion. In comments on August 1, 2018, during a hearing on Russian disinformation efforts, Senator Harris implied that Russia’s efforts were enabled by America’s inherent divisions:

[W]e have issues and fissures that are legitimate and run deep, and provoke potent reactions. We have a history of slavery in this country. We have a history of Jim Crow, of lynchings, of segregation, and discrimination. And indeed, we have a lot to do to repair and to recover from the harm of the past and some harm that continues today.

Nonetheless, she suggested Russia had interfered with America’s “diverse family” and “tried to turn us against each other.”

On February 5, she put out a remarkable tweet that suggested diversity is America’s “Achilles heel”:

Russia was able to influence our election because they figured out that racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and transphobia are America’s Achilles heel. These issues aren’t only civil rights — they’re also a matter of national security. We have to deal with that.

The next day, she declared: “The strength of our union has never been found in the walls we build. It’s in our diversity and our unity — and that is our power.” This seems like a contradiction of what she said the day before, which implied that diversity can be exploited by foes. Yet what Senator Harris is doing both with her comments on Columbus Day and on Russia and national security is transforming the traditional idea of national security.

Usually, a nation’s history and heritage are sources of strength, reasons to sacrifice for the state and fight against foreign enemies. However, in Senator Harris’s view, the country is a crime scene that must repent of its history. America’s new defining mythos is not about the Revolution or the settlement of the West, but the conquest of its own past. The main enemies in the “battle against inequality” are domestic. Foreign adversaries can exploit the “racism” or “transphobia” of certain elements of the American population, making their loyalty suspect. During her candidacy announcement, Kamala Harris said America is in a time “when we have foreign powers infecting the White House like malware.” President Trump himself, by defending traditional American history and appealing to nationalism, is suspect.

A candidate opposed to immigration law enforcement decrying the influence of “foreign powers” sounds absurd. One illegal immigrant on American soil constitutes more foreign meddling than all the Russian “disinformation” put together. Yet Kamala Harris is putting forward a new conception of the American national identity. America is to be defined by non-white immigration and a hopeful vision of racial egalitarianism. Those who identify with Christopher Columbus, the Confederacy, and to some extent, the Founding Fathers, are now less American than those who identify with the American Indians. Linking the seemingly disparate subjects of Russia and racism allows her to dismiss opposition to multiculturalism or mass immigration. Opposition to Kamala Harris’s program of cultural transformation becomes not legitimate dissent, but a dangerous disruption of national unity that foreign foes are sponsoring.

Under Senator Harris’s program, white Americans who don’t want their country remade become foreigners in their own country. Like aristocrats in revolutionary France, those who oppose cultural change are being accused of being in league with foreign powers, in this case Russia, home of the “Alt-Right International,” as a 2016 article in The Atlantic put it. Kamala Harris’ project of remaking American identity and her ominous talk about the supposed national security dangers of “racism” and “transphobia” are preparing the groundwork for treating white advocates like an internal threat. Nationalist whites, it seems, will not be part of America’s “diverse family.” If mass immigration proponents such as Kamala Harris get their way, America will belong to every group except whites — and whites won’t just be a despised minority, but the enemy within.