Is Kamala a radical or a moderate? It depends on which day of the week you ask.
There are two Kamalas: one real and one fake.
Like many politicians, Kamala Devi Harris created a character and a familiar narrative of an underprivileged childhood (“that little girl was me”), a middle-class family “(I grew up in a middle-class household”) and then going into politics not for personal gain, but to help people (“to aspire to create wealth is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. If that is what one chooses. I, on the other hand, have chosen to live a life of public service.”)
Unfortunately none of it is true.
The truth was that Kamala was the “privileged child of foreign grad students” (Los Angeles Times) who attended “Montreal’s tony Westmount” and then began her career socializing with the elites of Nob Hill.
Before Kamala started claiming to be from a “middle class household”, her mother was telling a very different story to Modern Luxury magazine, bragging, “When Kamala was in first grade one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, ‘Oh, I’ve been there.’ So I told her, ‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.”
“We weren’t rich in financial terms, but the values we internalized provided a different kind of wealth,” Kamala claimed in her memoir The Truths We Hold.
In reality, she came from wealthy parents, was raised in a wealthy family and among elites. The Los Angeles Times described P.V. Gopalan, Kamala’s grandfather, as “part of a privileged elite”.
Modern Luxury quoted “one of Harris’s Nob Hill friends” as saying that “her Brahmin background accounts for her ease around wealthy, powerful people.”
And Kamala’s life of “public service” allows her to live in a $5 million home with a “spa-like” master bedroom, and a kidney-shaped pool and gifted her and her husband an estimated net worth of $8 million.
A good deal of that money came through her husband whose career as a partner at major law firms seemed to parallel her upward rise through the political ranks.
As Kamala got into politics, she began reinventing her past, falsely claiming that she had been in “the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools” when schools began to be integrated the year she was born and plagiarized an MLK story about demanding “Fweedom” as a child in the spirit of the civil rights movement.
Berkeley had not been segregated, but her family home is in Brentwood which is 84% white and 1.2% black in Los Angeles, a city that is nearly 10% black, more closely fits the bill.
Kamala claimed that she had come from a family of smuggling middle class “renters” and that her wealthy cancer researcher mother “saved for well over a decade to buy a home.”
In reality, her mother moved around too much to buy a home in any one place until much later.
There followed the stories of listening to Snoop Dogg and Tupac before it was possible and lying that her grandfather had been part of India’s independence movement.
Throughout her political career, Kamala went on rewriting her life even as she was living it.
No sooner did she run for public office for the first time in 2003 than she falsely claimed to have “tried hundreds of serious felonies” only to then reduce the number down to 50.
Often she could not even decide which of her contradictory identities she wanted to be.
Was she Indian or black? Kamala alternated, code switching between black and Indian audiences.
Black audiences heard about her singing in a church choir as a child while Indian audiences were regaled with stories of her mother’s cooking and Tamil expressions.
While she boasts about an interfaith family, she selectively disavows parts of her background for the right audiences in an absurd fashion such as claiming that her Indian mother was “determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
On the road, Kamala casually swaps accents and identities. As a Politico headline cynically observed after her performance at the DNC convention, “Kamala Harris’ Secret Power: She Is Whatever You Want Her to Be”.
Kamala’s constant revisionism makes her everything. And nothing.
Kamala is a social justice prosecutor. A feminist who covers for sex predators. A socialist moderate. A girl who came out of California’s richest and poorest neighborhood.
She believes in everything and nothing. Mostly she believes in whatever her audience wants to hear.
Interrogated about her contradictory positions on banning fracking and other radical ideas, Kamala disavowed them while arguing that her positions had changed, but “my values have not changed”.
After the industry backlash against the proposed price controls, her surrogates assured, “don’t worry about the details. It’s never going to pass Congress.”
Her previous proposal to ban health insurance?
“The truth of the matter is, yes, she’s come to the middle,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, one of her legion of surrogates, told the media. “Kamala Harris did support things that she’s now moderated.”
“To aspire to create wealth is a good thing,” Kamala had argued. And now she proposed a tax on unrealized capital gains that would wipe out much of the economy.
Is Kamala a radical or a moderate? It depends on which day of the week you ask.
She’s a feminist reformer who started her political career as a 29-year-old by having an affair with Wiille Brown: the 60-year-old married corrupt mayor of San Francisco.
Kamala came out of it with a BMW and positions on state boards that paid $400,000 and got her up the political ladder.
“I met her through Willie,” the former chairman of the California Democratic Party, said in an interview.
“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie.”
Kamala traces her political legacy back to minority women, but it was the wealthy white woke socialites who launched and funded her career after an introduction from a black man cheating with her on his wife.
She claims that she wanted to become a prosecutor because a friend of hers had been molested by her father.
“A big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her and change the system.”
In reality, Kamala had built her political career by attaching herself to Willie Brown.
In the 90s, two aides filed a lawsuit alleging that Willie Brown had fired them for reporting sexual harassment by one of his allies.
They were able to settle their cases for $100,000.
When Democrat women complained about Biden touching them inappropriately, Kamala initially supported them.
“I believe them and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it,” Harris said.
In 2019, she believed Biden’s accusers, but by 2020, she was insisting that the “Joe Biden I know is somebody who really has fought for women and empowerment of women.”
Kamala fights for women unless there’s a man who can give her a leg up the political ladder.
There have always been two Kamalas. And every time she speaks, writes or hits the campaign trail, the real and fake Kamalas collide. How do you tell apart the real Kamala and the fake?
The only way is to look at her actual history, her record and those around her because while fake men and women run for public office all the time, it’s their real doppelgangers who govern.
Originally Published in FrontPage Magazine