It’s April 1986, high radiation levels set off alarms at a nuclear power plant in Sweden. The Swedes quickly determine that the radiation most likely originated in Ukraine. After several weeks of denials, the Soviets admit that a large meteor with an unusually large quantity of uranium has crashed near the city of Pripyat in the north of the country.

Coincidentally, this is near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The Soviets, of course, deny that there’s been an accident at the plant, but won’t allow outside observers to examine the plant or any evidence from a meteor nor to question or examine any of the victims of the impact.

Western media organizations dutifully report the Soviet version of events, especially after Ronald Reagan, the U.S. President, floats a “nuclear meltdown” theory. Respected nuclear scientists in the west also publish letters of support for the Meteor Theory, advancing the implausibility of a nuclear meltdown scenario at a power plant, and that any release of radiation must have come from a natural source.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the U.S. government advance the possibility that there indeed was a nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Some of the more conspiratorial ones claim there was a military weapons program at the plant which went awry.

At the same time, Democrats, media companies, and elite institutions refer to such claims of a meltdown at Chernobyl as “racist conspiracy theories”, “anti-science”, and “disinformation”. While TV and Radio broadcasts ban reporting on the Chernobyl Leak Theory.

Thousands of people in Europe subsequently die of radiation poisoning, governments mandate lockdowns to keep people in-doors while medical researchers try to come up with a vaccine for the radiation poisoning. While skeptical protestors are ridiculed as “cherbydiots.”

Of course the events depicted above did not happen, and the Russians copped to an accident at the Chernobyl power plant the same day the Swedes detected the radiation. While an adversarial Western media challenged the Russians on their lack of transparency on the accident.

But just imagine if the West had responded in such a way to claims by the Russians of a “meteor impact.” In other words, imagine that in 1986 Western media would have responded the way they did during the Covid outbreak of 2020: taken the side of a totalitarian government in its PR war to essentially cover-up a man-made disaster, especially after that government banned access to the site of the disaster, any evidence or material from there, or any of its victims.

It’s hard to do so.

                                                                               1.

At first glance, it’s easy to see the immediate appeal of a natural-origin theory for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid): it’s uncomplicated. The natural world is host to a multitude of deadly pathogens always at the ready to cause mayhem for the human race. Previous, though less-deadly pandemics have begun from a natural origin.

In fact, the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic started in China and was genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan province. And similarly to 2020, the Chinese government obfuscated the extent of the outbreak. So the supposition, especially amongst epidemiologists, virologists, and public health officials, that Covid would turn out to be of natural origin is understandable.

What’s not understandable is that given the lack of a smoking gun, the unusual spread of the virus in China and once the circumstantial evidence for a Covid lab-leak started to accumulate, (fairly quickly) after the pandemic started spreading around the world, that the elite media would cling so ferociously to a defense of a natural origin. But more than that, that they would show so much contempt for a lab-leak theory, especially given the likelihood for it being nonzero, is hard to comprehend.

For scientists involved in virology and epidemiology the skepticism is at least understandable. They’re more aware of the possibility of contagion from wild animals, they’re more familiar with lab safety protocols, etc. However, they are not a disinterested party and have a conflict of interest in defending a natural-origin hypothesis. They are also intimately familiar with the advanced genetic manipulation and gain-of-function techniques available to modern virology researchers which could be used to concoct a virus like SARS-Cov-2

So it is ironic that knowing both the advanced techniques available and how a lapse in safety-protocols and pushing the envelope on virology research could easily lead to a lab-leak and cause a global pandemic, that these scientists would be so invested in pushing a natural origin theory. It’s almost as if they were looking for an alibi.

Less understandable is the contempt and skepticism of the elite-media to a lab-leak theory. Journalists are usually trained to be skeptical, especially if a party has a vested interest in pushing a narrative. Obviously scientists, virologists, and researches had a vested interest in promulgating a natural origin theory. If there was even a 1% chance that Covid leaked from a lab, their funding would dry-up, scientists would be blamed for causing one of the deadliest viral outbreaks in history, and their life’s work would be that much harder to undertake and justify.

                                                                       2.

To a skeptical person, the immediate possibility of a lab-leak accident in Wuhan is readily apparent for several reasons:

1) That the first cluster of cases in China, that we know of, centered around the Hunan Seafood Market in densely populated Wuhan, a mere 16 miles north of the Wuhan Institute of Virology—one of the foremost corona virus research centers in the world, is highly-unusual especially for a novel virus. If in fact the virus was the result of animal-based progenitor strains interacting, wouldn’t Covid outbreaks have started near where the animals were caught in the wild, impacting more remote village communities first, rather than appearing “fully-formed” in Wuhan?

2) There is also a question of the virus’ rare structure—the insertion of a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 boundary in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which allows it to so easily infect humans.

3) Proposals that WIV was working on would have led to a Covid-type virus being created. In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant application titled “Project DEFUSE” to DARPA. It proposed experiments to introduce furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses. Furin cleavage sites are an attribute found in some viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, that can help make these viruses more infectious. But importantly almost never found in naturally-occurring coronovirii.

So then the reasons for elite-media contempt of a lab-leak scenario are essentially puerile, especially for what are supposed to be serious news organizations. The lab-leak hypothesis was, from the very beginning, associated with Donald Trump and his allies. And that was essentially enough.

It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. A hypothesis about the origin of a pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide was dismissed—not on its merits, not after rigorous investigation, not because the evidence pointed decisively elsewhere—but because the wrong people were saying it. The heuristic was breathtakingly simple: if Trump says it, it must be wrong. If Tom Cotton raises it in the Senate, it’s a conspiracy theory. If Steve Bannon amplifies it, it’s disinformation. The proposition wasn’t evaluated; the proposers were.

This is, of course, a textbook genetic fallacy—judging a claim by its source rather than its substance. First-year philosophy students are taught to identify and avoid it. And yet it became the operative editorial framework at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and virtually every other prestige outlet in the country for the better part of two years.

The irony is almost too neat. These same organizations had spent the Trump years building an institutional identity around being the “adults in the room,” the sober, fact-driven counterweight to populist recklessness. They branded themselves as the arbiters of truth in an era of “post-truth politics.” And when confronted with a genuinely consequential empirical question—one with life-or-death implications for billions—they defaulted to the laziest form of tribal reasoning imaginable: our team says natural origin, their team says lab-leak, therefore natural origin is correct.

There’s a deeper pathology here, too. By 2020, the elite media had developed a reflexive deference to credentialed expertise that was, paradoxically, deeply anti-intellectual. They didn’t engage with the science; they deferred to scientists—specific scientists, with specific institutional affiliations and specific conflicts of interest.

When Peter Daszak organized his Lancet letter declaring that the lab-leak was a “conspiracy theory,” that was treated as dispositive. No mainstream reporter, at least initially, thought to ask why the man whose organization had funneled NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was being treated as a disinterested authority on whether that same lab might have been the source of the outbreak. The conflict of interest was glaring, and yet it went unremarked upon in newsrooms that supposedly pride themselves on following the money.

This wasn’t deference to science. It was deference to authority—exactly the kind of uncritical, hierarchical thinking these institutions claim to oppose. Real scientific skepticism would have demanded more investigation, not less. It would have treated the absence of an intermediary host as a significant data point. It would have noted the remarkable coincidence of a novel coronavirus emerging miles from one of the world’s foremost coronavirus research laboratories. It would have asked hard questions about the WIV’s database going dark in September 2019, months before the official start of the outbreak.

Instead, what the public got was something closer to a protection racket for the scientific establishment. Reporters who wouldn’t dream of taking a pharmaceutical company’s press release at face value somehow found it perfectly acceptable to take virologists at theirs—virologists who stood to lose everything if the lab-leak turned out to be true: their funding, their reputations, their freedom to conduct the very research that may have caused the catastrophe in the first place.

And the enforcers weren’t subtle. When journalists like Josh Rogin at The Washington Post or science writer Nicholas Wade published careful, evidence-based treatments of the lab-leak hypothesis, they weren’t met with counterarguments. They were met with social opprobrium. The message from the media establishment to its own members was clear: pursue this line of inquiry and you will be placed in the same bucket as QAnon adherents and anti-vaxxers. It was a staggeringly effective form of peer pressure, and it worked precisely because journalists, like most professionals, care enormously about their standing among colleagues.

The result was a kind of informational monoculture at exactly the moment the world needed intellectual diversity most. Millions of people were dying. Governments were making sweeping policy decisions. And the institutions theoretically tasked with holding power accountable—including the power of the scientific establishment—chose instead to function as that establishment’s public relations arm. Not because they’d investigated and found the natural-origin theory convincing on the evidence, but because endorsing it was socially safe, and investigating the alternative was not.

                                                                       3.

In March 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant proposal to DARPA under its PREEMPT program (PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats). The proposal, titled "Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses," or Project DEFUSE, laid out a multi-year research plan that, in retrospect, reads less like an abstract academic exercise and more like an inadvertent engineering specification for SARS-CoV-2.

The DEFUSE proposal included several goals: Collect and catalog hundreds of bat coronavirus samples from cave sites across southern China, building a library of novel SARS-related coronaviruses. Construct chimeric viruses—synthetic hybrids assembled from genetic material of multiple different coronaviruses—to test which spike protein configurations were most capable of infecting human cells.

Drafts and notes obtained through FOIA requests revealed that Baric had already generated chimeric spike proteins from bat virus strains that do not appear in any published scientific literature, suggesting preliminary work was underway before the grant was even submitted.

The most consequential of these was to insert furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein of thes virii. A furin cleavage site is a specific molecular feature that allows the spike protein to be cut by furin, an enzyme abundantly present in human cells. This cleavage dramatically enhances the virus’s ability to enter and infect human tissue—it is, in effect, the molecular key that made SARS-CoV-2 so devastatingly transmissible.

The DEFUSE proposal, outlined a process requiring “stitching” together DNA fragments and included plans to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” (such as the furin cleavage site) into bat viruses using a specific restriction enzyme, BsmBI. BsmBI is part of the “type IIS” restriction enzyme family used in Golden Gate Assembly, which is ideal for such insertions.

Critically, SARS-CoV-2 is the only known virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that possesses this feature. The DEFUSE proposal explicitly described plans to introduce precisely this kind of modification, at precisely this location, into bat coronaviruses.

A 2022 preprint analysis determined that SARS-CoV-2 itself appears to have been assembled in six fragments using this very same enzyme—a correspondence that proponents of natural origin have struggled to explain as coincidence.

Then there is the lack of an Intermediary Host. With SARS-1, researchers identified the intermediary host (civets, then traced to bats) relatively quickly. With COVID, despite years of searching and testing tens of thousands of animals, no intermediary host has been found, and no progenitor virus in nature has been identified. This absence of evidence isn't proof, but it's a conspicuous gap for a virus supposedly originating in nature.

Thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C., with some breaking in to the Capitol building and briefly setting fire to the entrance today, after lawmakers started certifying the electoral votes from the election in November.

During the protests, Capitol Police fired tear gas and guns, plunging the capital into turmoil. At least ten protestors were fatally shot and over 130 others injured, according to Amnesty International and several prominent American human rights groups. The toll could not be immediately confirmed. The independent American Human Rights Commission posted a video that showed police officers firing as protesters marched toward them.

As tear gas wafted through the streets, some protesters climbed through the windows of the U.S. Capitol building after lawmakers voted 195 to 106 in favor of certification on Tuesday, with supporters saying they were fulfilling their sacred duty to protect democracy

United States’ president, Joseph Biden, said he was deploying the military to crack down on what he called “treasonous elements.” In a televised address on Tuesday night, Mr. Biden said the debate about the election had been “hijacked by dangerous people who have caused us the kind of loss we have incurred as a nation today.”

He vowed to punish those he said were responsible. “It is not in order or even conceivable that criminals pretending to be peaceful protesters can reign terror against the people, their elected representatives and the institutions established under our Constitution and expect to go scot-free,” Mr. Biden added.

The Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, said the security services had been deployed to support the police, who he said were responding to the “security emergency” caused by the protests, which spread to other American cities.

The turmoil over the certification has shaken the United States, a North American economic powerhouse of 334 million people that has long been an anchor of stability in a tumultuous region. Last week, at least 1,000 people were killed and 20,000 others injured in protests across the country, according to Amnesty International.

The protests convulsed America just as 400 American police officers were arriving in Haiti as part of an international effort to try to restore order to that country, which has been ravaged by gang violence.

Mr. Biden’s government introduced the certification bill in May. The majority leader in Congress, the lower house of the American government, Nancy Pelosi, has said the bill is “crucial” to secure the election process. Adding, "this decision is not, and was never about politics, and this shouldn't be about political parties or elections. It's about facts, dignity in public service, and honoring those who fought and continue to fight to protect our sacred democracy."

“Without the passage of this bill, essential government operations would come to a standstill,” one supporter wrote on social media last week, adding that lawmakers had responded to criticism by removing unpopular taxes on bread and other items.

But many Americans roundly criticized the legislation, saying in actuality the certification bill adds punitive measures for voting for Republican candidates, labeling them as “subversives” in the bill. Detractors also pointed to corruption and mismanagement of state funds, and faulted the opulent lifestyle and extravagant spending that they said had characterized the administration of Mr. Biden, who has been in office since 2021.

The president now has two weeks to sign the legislation or send it back to Congress for amendments.

So-called right-wing extremists who have helped to fuel the protests said that their movement transcends class, party and race.

Some protesters have confronted officials at public gatherings and in houses of worship, and carried coffins to the offices of lawmakers who supported the legislation.

“The politicians have for too long underestimated our power, energy and passion,” said Steven Hassel, 26, of San Antonio, Texas,. “We are now asking questions and demanding answers, and they are surprised by this revolution happening at their doorsteps.”

On Saturday, nightclubs across Texas played the national anthem to rally against the certification bill, and on Sunday, church leaders and congregants voiced their opposition to the tax increases at religious services.

As the protests spread on Tuesday, demonstrators draped themselves in American flags, blew whistles and plastic trumpets, and chanted, “Biden must go.” In Waco, about 100 miles south of Dallas, they blocked streets with burning tires and shouted, “Reject,” a reference to a hashtag that has galvanized the anti-certification movement on social media.

Government officials have blamed unspecified foreign powers for stirring up the protests and dismissed the demonstrators as privileged youngsters who wield iPhones, arrive at demonstrations via Uber and then go eat at KFC.

Protesters rejected that description.

“It’s not about how we get to the protests, but why we are here in the streets,” said Anita Harris, 19, whose TikTok videos about the demonstrations have gained a large following. “They are trying to take attention away from our demands, but we, the cool kids, are seeing that we don’t have a bright future and want change.”

Before the demonstration on Tuesday, several activists who are prominent critics of the bill were abducted, according to the Law Society of Houston. The abductors’ identities were not publicly known, but some were believed to be intelligence officers, according to the Law Society’s president, John McKensey. He later said that some of those abducted had been released.

Several protesters said they had received threats or intimidating phone calls in the days and hours leading up to the protests and were fearing for their lives.

Human Rights groups have long accused successive American governments of kidnapping critics and torturing them. The police did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, condemned the abductions, calling them “a direct assault” on the rule of law.

In a joint statement, the ambassadors of 13 Western embassies in Washington, D.C., including the United Kingdom, said they were “shocked” by the scenes outside the U.S. Capitol building and “deeply concerned” by allegations that some protesters had been abducted by security forces.

“We condemn the violence reported during protests in Washington, D.C. and around the United States,” Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the British High Commission, said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. He added, “We urge restraint to restore order and provide space for dialogue.”

The half sister of former President Barack Obama, Auma Obama, was among the protesters engulfed in tear gas on Tuesday, according to CNN footage. “Young Americans are demonstrating for their rights,” Ms. Obama told a CNN reporter, before she began coughing and wincing.

“I can’t even see anymore,” she said.

Just after 6 p.m. in Washington, D.C., activists urged protesters to leave the city center. Public transportation services were not readily available, two protesters said, so they were walking home with others.

“Go home. While it’s still safe,” Boniface Mwangi, a D.C. photographer and activist, wrote on social media. “The government will send goons to destroy, loot and blame peaceful protesters. They must listen to us. Spread the word for people to start walking home in groups. We shall be back.”

Brat Summer

A strange, almost cult-like fervor fell upon progressives on that fateful Sunday in July when Joe Biden, having opted-out of the presidential race, endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to take his place.

Almost immediately massive donations came pouring-in, to the tune of at least a billion dollars, in the days and weeks following the endorsement1.

And almost immediately the media narrative became that of Harris as the “joy” candidate2; the “coconut tree” candidate; the “Brat Summer” candidate3. In short, the American media was vibin’ with the Kamalanomenon4.

The sudden turn in her popularity is almost astonishing. During her first year as V.P., Harris' public approval ratings sat at 28%, making her one of the least popular vice-presidents in modern history—lower than Dick Cheney, who was reviled by Democrats.

In fact, she gave the “coconut tree” speech itself at a swearing-in ceremony for the commissioners of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics (PACAEEEEOH, for short) in May, 2023—the type of thankless and perfunctory task, that Chief-Executives will use to curry favor with Congressional caucus members, or their constituents. But here performed by the Vice-President, presumably because it was too taxing on Biden.

Whereas in the previous three years, she was a barely-there member of the Biden Administration, suddenly in summer of 2024, she was the happy embodiment of Democrats’ hopes of vanquishing their loathed enemy, Donald Trump5.

2020

The suddenness and ferociousness of Harris’ support was almost like an old Soviet psychological operation or some cultish kirtan, comprised of reality-denial, confirmation bias, historical revisionism, and gas-lighting: that she “was never the Border Czar”6, that she is “among the most qualified” candidates in recent history7, etc.

Millions of progressive supporters, almost overnight, fell in the thrall of the Harris campaign. Whatever her previous faults and deficiencies, they were forgotten in a haze of electoral delirium. Democrats had to believe she was the best person to take on Trump (even if she wasn’t)

Yet Harris was, objectively, amongst the weakest V.P.s turned presidential candidates since Walter Mondale.

Kamala Devi Harris was born 1964 in Oakland, CA to a mother from Madras in India, and a father from Brown's Town in Jamaica.

She graduated from UC Law in San Francisco in 1989, after which she became a Bay-area prosecutor eventually working under Terence Hallinan, the storied San Francisco District Attorney.

Her first run at elected office was to oust Hallinan as the DA in 2003. The election consisted of two rounds. In the first round she received 34% of the vote, while Hallinan received 36%. The third candidate was Bill Fazio, a former prosecutor turned defense attorney, who received 30%. All three were Democrats.

In the second round she beat Hallinan with 56% of the vote.

Seven years later, in 2010, Harris then ran for California Attorney General. That contest was more competitive, barely beating Republican Steve Cooley, with 46% of the vote to Cooley’s 45%. Cooley had the advantage of name recognition as the DA for Los Angeles. But Democrats swept state-wide offices that year combined with support from then-president Obama and she made it over the line.

Harris remained CA Attorney General until 2016, when she ran for U.S. Senate. Her Senate run was fairly mundane. CA has an open primary for that office and she came out ahead of dozens of other candidates, with 40% of the vote. The next closest candidate, Loretta Sanchez, only received 19%.

In the general election she handily defeated Sanchez, a fellow Democrat with over 60% of the vote.

In other words, up until 2019 when she decides to run for president just two years after assuming the Senate office, she exclusively had been a candidate in friendly political territory, with the support of political insiders, including the President himself.

And yet her 2019 candidacy faced challenges from the start. Harris and her closest advisers were indecisive about which states to target, issues to emphasize and which opponents to go after, all the while refusing to make difficult personnel choices and impose order on an unwieldy campaign.

When she entered the race in January of 2019, she wagered that the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire would be less significant to her political success than South Carolina, with its predominantly black Democratic electorate. In this view, a strong performance in South Carolina, which votes fourth, would catapult her into Super Tuesday states like California, boosting her momentum.

Harris' campaign message was influenced by extensive polling, which suggested that the word “truth” resonated strongly with people. Consequently, she named her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold” and incorporated a similar phrase, “Let’s speak truth,” into her early campaign speeches. However, she eventually abandoned this slogan, believing that voters preferred something more concrete.

Throughout much of the year she concentrated on competing against Biden in South Carolina and beyond. However, her campaign did not foresee that he would maintain strong support among voters.

Then in the first Democratic debate in June, she tried to knee-cap him: “I do not believe you are a racist…but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

Harris was describing Biden’s remarks in which he recalled his “civil” working relationships with segregationist senators such as James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia.

And while she briefly surged to the top of the field, her attack on Biden did little to improve her prospects. In fact it was the high water-mark of her campaign. Five months later, she was out of the race.

Her assumptions about the issues that would inspire Democrats were muddled: she began running on a tax cut aimed at lower- and middle-income voters and then turned to a pay raise for teachers.

However, these proposals failed to captivate voters, particularly those drawn to the policies of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Consequently, Harris soon began to downplay her once-prominent proposals.

At one point, she tried to emphasize a practical agenda, focusing on issues she claimed kept voters awake at 3 a.m. Still, the NY Times referred to her as “an uneven campaigner” who “changes her message and tactics to little effect.”8 Her aides joked about the numerous slogans and catchphrases she used, with one noting how the “speak truth” spring transitioned into the “3 a.m.” summer, leading to Trump-centered “justice” winter.

But somehow, shockingly, Harris’ political future would get a new life as Biden’s choice for V.P.

Biden

When George Floyd died in police custody in the summer of 2020, it became a political liability for a candidate in the Democratic primary to be an elderly white man. Democrats were peak racial revolution then. So the activists within the Democratic party who populate the lower echelons of policy-making and execution9, were skeptical of Biden.

He needed a black woman, if he was to maintain the support of these activists. But ideally someone who was not a purely left-wing ideologue and could demonstrate some more centrist credentials. He got both in Harris.

It’s hard to imagine, though, the Joe Biden of 1988 caving in to pressure from his left wing. That Joe Biden would not have wanted or cared about the support of left-wing activists whose only other choice would have been a distant-second Bernie Sanders. But 2020 Joe Biden was well into his senescence and under the spell of his lefty advisors, so picking the worst candidate in the field, who heavily implied he was a racist to his face, made sense to him somehow.

Yet there was an original sin at the birth of the Biden/Harris administration. On the same afternoon he was sworn in as the nation’s 46^th president, Joe Biden undid several of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

The list of orders included renewing DACA, stopping construction on the border wall and putting a moratorium on deportations.

“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” Biden said while signing the orders.

Subsequently, the Biden/Harris Administration issued a series of immigration enforcement, policy and rule changes that would essentially dismantle immigration enforcement at the southern border in its entirety.

When historians examine the key factors behind Trump’s second victory in 2024, they will likely highlight the Biden administration’s decision to allow over 7.3 million illegal immigrants into the U.S.

These immigration policies negatively impacted Harris’ prospects in two significant ways. Firstly, Biden was elected on the presumption by most voters that he would be a steady hand, wisely guiding the ship of state after the tumult of the Trump years.

By effectively opening the border to anyone who could cross it as one of his initial actions, Biden undermined this perception of competence.

Secondly, the obvious consequences of allowing millions of people from the poorest regions of the world to enter the U.S. without proper documentation, background checks, or means of support, and then transporting them to various towns and cities across the country at taxpayer expense, would make even open border advocates uneasy. This includes increased strain on schools and hospitals, as well as the compounded tragedy when a migrant commits a violent crime, which might not have occurred if Biden had not opened the border in the first place.

Not to mention the safety of our cats and geese!

Combine these along with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, and the grinding effects of inflation on Americans’ pocketbooks and it strains credulity to think that a candidate so closely associated with the Biden Administration would have the slimmest chance of winning without a radical break.

Kamala Harris offered neither.

2024

So why did the Kamalanomenon train go off the rails?

For starters, Harris was a bad candidate. I don’t mean her policies were bad, necessarily. But she clearly had trouble selling them. In interviews, she had a tendency to give word-salad answers while trying to avoid giving concrete ones which might contradict something she said previously10. She famously bombed in an interview with Lester Holt in 2021, in which she struggled to articulate the administration’s strategy for securing the border.

And maybe that works for a lawyer, and certainly many politicians have law degrees. But if you’re even a middling politician, at some level you have to be able to connect to people, especially those whose votes you have to win-over, and who aren’t fanatical ideologues who will enthusiastically vote for you because your name isn’t Trump.

Which leads to the second reason: her dearth of adversarial press appearances, not only in this campaign, but throughout her Vice-Presidency. Almost as soon as she joined the Biden campaign, she was hidden from the press like some secret love-child.

For a candidate who did not go through the traditional primary process, initially shying from the press did her no favors.

Even after her campaign acceded to do more interviews she refused to clarify any serious positions and transitioning to a more open approach with interviews failed predictably.

“Harris was shaky, unreliable, and inexperienced,” said former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer to the Washington Examiner.11 “Walz is a junior varsity player who wasn't ready for the major leagues.”

Harris and Walz have primarily engaged with friendly platforms like The Tonight Show, The View, the Call Your Daddy podcast, and the Howard Stern Show. However, their lackluster performances, even in the face of mostly soft questions, drew criticism and highlighted the reasons behind Harris’ earlier decision to keep out of the spotlight.

Since the summer, when Harris and Walz had their first interview with CNN as the 2024 Democratic nominees, Harris’ media appearances have been carefully managed, while Walz has participated in fewer interviews.

The challenge for Harris and Walz was that, according to Fleischer, “neither is truly prepared to assume the roles of president and vice president.”

Doug Heye, former communications director for the Republican National Committee, believes that Harris’ performance during her media appearances illustrates why she “hasn’t done many interviews.”

“She simply isn’t good at them,” Heye told the Washington Examiner. “In a supportive environment, with a question designed for her to excel, she still fell short.”

Referring to Harris’s appearance on The View, Heye pointed out that she failed to distinguish herself from President Joe Biden, despite polls indicating that voters are seeking change. He argued, “If she can’t provide substantive answers about her plans for the economy or what she would do differently from Biden, then she’s not a strong candidate.”

The third reason: her choice of running-mate. For all the artifice of casting him as “America’s coach,” the truth is that Tim Walz is the liberal governor of a deep-blue state, Minnesota. CNN called him a “progressive champion.”12 And, in fact, it only takes a few minutes of Googling to find that out, it’s not even an open secret. One only has to look at the ideological tilt of the bills he signed as governor, once Democrats had the majority in the state legislature.

Not to mention that he oversaw the destruction of Minneapolis during the summer of 2020. Records and past public statements show that officials in that city described the governor’s initial response as noncommittal.

Records obtained by the NY Times13 show, the mayor considered sending out a news release detailing his request: “I’ve reached out to Governor Walz to request the assistance of the Minnesota National Guard to help de-escalate and prevent any further conflict.”

But Walz did not agree to send the Guard the first night and looting and arson continued.

Ultimately it’s hard to believe that more moderate voters, as one finds in Wisconsin and Michigan, would be overjoyed in Walz’s response to the rioting in 2020. If anything, they would have trepidation with a ticket fronted by a liberal Californian, add a liberal fire-brand running-mate and a vote for Harris-Walz become harder to justify.

Just one of these factors would have imperiled a competant presidentail campaign. Combine them all, and the unfocused and ersatz one run by Harris and you get the pitying results we saw on election night.

1.

Hunter Biden landed a position on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2014.1 His annual salary was around $1 million per year, until March 2017, when it was reduced to around $500,000. Co-incidentally (or not) his father had left the vice presidency in January of that year.2

By the time Hunter left Burisma in 2019 his firm earned about $11 million dollars. Burisma was just one of several foreign companies that had paid Hunter Biden, an otherwise middling Yale law-school graduate with zero experience in the oil & gas industry, millions of dollars in essentially no-show jobs in the years his father was Vice-President.

On its face it seems evident why these companies would pay Biden fils ludicrous sums of money for his “expertise”: his immediate connection to the then Vice-President (and now President) of the United States.

In the case of Burisma, it held a special interest in getting close to Biden père since he was charged with handling anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine by the Obama administration. So clearly having Hunter on the payroll would seem like an easy decision on their part.

Of course Joe has denied Hunter or himself were involved in any wrongdoing: that the sole problem with Hunter Biden’s employment by Burisma was the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“There’s nobody that’s indicated there’s a single solitary thing that [Hunter] did that was inappropriate, wrong . . . or anything other than the appearance. It looked bad that he was there”3

But the fact is Hunter Biden traded heavily on his surname and used it to rake in millions of dollars in advisory and consulting fees. And he’s ultimately implicated in several crimes in his financial dealings with foreign companies over the years, not least of which is tax evasion, for which he was recently indicted.4

In a point of irony one can look at former officials in the Trump administration to find out the jeopardy Hunter is in. Take the case of Paul Manafort, who ironically also found himself in trouble for his dealings with Ukraine. Manafort plead guilty in 2018 to money laundering, tax evasion and failing to register as a foreign agent.5 Similarly, Manafort also deceived his tax advisers to avoid paying taxes on his gains and spending the money on a lavish lifestyle. Sound familiar?

The question, of course, is to what extent is Joe implicated? Is he “the big guy”?

It goes without saying that under U.S. federal law it’s illegal to bribe a public official. In 2008 former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens was found guilty for accepting gifts of home renovations from an oil company executive. The government never alleged that Stevens personally returned the favor, merely that he didn't disclose the full value on his congressional disclosure forms.

It strains credulity that if Joe Biden accepted even $5 of Hunter’s money he wouldn’t be guilty of something similar.

It’s actually very interesting watching Democrats/progressives contort themselves into pretzels over how Hunter’s foreign business dealings: a) are merely a conspiracy theory6 and possible Russian disinformation campaign (Hunter’s incriminating laptop) b) aren’t remotely controversial even if true, c) even if there is a semblance of impropriety in Hunter’s dealings it’s is merely Hunter’s problem (he’s not a public official after all, they’ll yell into your ear) and d) even if Joe is remotely implicated in possible bribery and corruption, Trump did far worse, they’ll tell you.

So the question remains: to what extent is Joe implicated in a possible bribery scandal?

Hunter, by his own admission sold the ‘illusion of access’ to his father. He would often put Joe on speakerphone to impress clients and business associates.7

The institutional elite — as denoted by Media Twitter, ‘very online’ progressives and the elite media, — have a monopoly on acceptable narratives and “the truth”. Elite media crafts certain narratives favourable to Democrats or parroting left-wing talking points and ideology (“mostly peaceful” protests instead of riots, Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian “disinformation”, etc) while doing two things at the same time: disingenuously claiming that they’re not crafting left-wing narratives, merely reporting (or fact-checking) “the truth” and secondly deflecting any criticism that they’re just parroting a left-wing narrative by formulating such criticism as a Republican, right-wing, manufactured (as opposed to grass-roots) “assault” on said “truth.”

Take for instance the riots of Summer 2020. There is ample evidence that those riots caused billions of dollars in damage and resulted in dozens of deaths around the country. What’s notable is the response to those riots by progressives, the media, and Democratic politicians.

Firstly the media focused almost exclusively on crafting a narrative of these protests as a broad-based reaction by regular Americans to ongoing racial injustice, when that wasn’t the case at all. Protests were led and populated almost entirely by young white people under 30 who comprised the vast majority of protestors, only made possible because of COVID lockdowns that left them with a lot of time on their hands.

Secondly, the media maintained this narrative even as uneventful protests during the day led to burning, looting and rioting at night. They maintained this narrative even as people were murdered by rioters, businesses looted, and government buildings attacked. Of note, though, is the hypocrisy by the media and Democratic politicians with regards to the protestors: after months of media hyperventilating about people not adhering to social distancing including vile criticism of those protesting lockdowns in front of state legislatures a month prior, those concerns went out the window when literally thousands of people were crowding together yelling BLM slogans in the major cities in Summer of 2020.

Remarkable was any lack of concern about masses of people congregating in such numbers during a raging pandemic, especially after the same politicians and media activists had just spent the last few months prior castigating and chastising anyone congregating in public or flouting public health measures. In fact the media took great glee in labeling right-wing protestors as “idiots” in May 2020 for essentially doing the same thing left-wing protestors were doing in June.

Remarkable too was that any attempt to highlight the disparity between reporting and the ongoing riots was met by deflection and hand-waving by left-wing politicians and the media. They would never concede that rioting was taking place, claiming any criticism was just a “conspiracy theory” by malevolent right-wing reactionary forces who were attempting to slander the “broad-based” protests of “racial reckoning”.

It’s hard to imagine that if similar protests and rioting had taken place in Russia, or China, that coverage of those protests in Western media wouldn’t have included such words as “uprising” or “insurrection”.

Furthermore, these politicians and media-activists claimed, any rioting which was theoretically taking place was entirely justified since rioting was the “language of the oppressed”, and only “property” was damaged, which wasn’t true to begin with: people lost their lives in the riots.

That same deflection and hand-waving by the institutional left can be seen in the debate against Critical Race Theory. The controversy is being presented by the elite media and liberal blogs as a drummed-up culture-war issue by paranoid conservatives who “misunderstand” it, in effect gaslighting them.

During the pandemic, public schools, teachers unions and local schoolboards somehow thought that instead of ensuring children are reading and doing math at grade level, and that they have all the tools to succeed academically while learning from home, they would instead inculcate left-wing racialist and gender dogma in children.

The elite media (NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post, et al.) then try to obfuscate this reality by trying to craft a reality-control narrative, first of all denying that anti-racism is being promulgated at all in public schools: Critical Race Theory, they say, is only taught in certain law-school classes, not in elementary school, furthermore they deflect the indoctrination of children into left-wing political ideology as merely “teaching history”, and thirdly by characterizing grass-roots opposition to this indoctrination as some sort of right-wing astroturf campaign. An episode of NPR’s Fresh Air describes the opposition as being led by “conservative think tanks, media outlets and law firms.” In other words, the elite media is describing this issue as any opposition is fake and artificial, and in any case they merely oppose teaching American history.

The argument by progressives and the media is presented as one where conservatives in state legislatures are imposing bans on the necessary, in their view, teaching of systemic racism, moreover the fact that conservatives are bringing up CRT at all is as a culture-war smokescreen to distract from the usual claims of all the -isms that ail America.

One New Yorker article says that conservatives “have noticed that concepts used in critical race theory — ‘structural racism,’ ‘internalized white supremacy’ — have entered the mainstream, and in some cases have become part of corporate training or public-school education.”

The assumption being that CRT terms, such as “whiteness” are remotely mainstream.

It can never be a reaction to the introduction of “anti-racist” indoctrination by social-justice activists in the various schoolboards and universities. In other words, parents have no legitimate cause to rail against CRT, and any reaction to it is illegitimate if not outright devious.

As proof of this just take the recent letter from the National School Boards Association, where they plead with the Biden admin to have the FBI investigate outraged parents who dare question their school board positions on anti-racism and gender identity.

In it, the NSBA likens parents to “domestic terrorists.”

Now imagine if the same thing had happened under the Trump administration: let’s say the NRA had sent a letter imploring William Barr to pursue activists targeting NRA meetings, and then that the Department of Justice had actually began one? Can you imagine the outrage amongst liberals and in the media!

And yet that’s where we are in the U.S. in 2023: the left claims enemies of the Republic and wrongthingkers are everywhere on the right, whilst simultaneously engaging in the very acts they claim to be against: it’s OK for anarchist rioters try to burn down a courthouse in Portland during the riots of 2020, but when right-wing plebes try to vandalise the U.S. Capitol building, it’s nothing short of an insurrection, according to them.