Kamala Harris Repeats Biden’s 2012 ‘Back In Chains’ Moment

No other Democrat the party could have nominated this year better exemplifies the left’s obsession with identity politics than Vice President Kamala Harris. Woke but not poor, black but not oppressed, and pissed off when talking about her uterus, no Democrat who ran in 2019 is more emblematic of a character shaped by the far-left hysterics around “social justice.” So naturally, Harris would embrace the kind of moral bankruptcy she projects onto her opponents in discussions on race.

On Tuesday, Harris continued to embrace her boss’s exploitation of racial grievances for ballots by claiming Republicans want to enslave all black people.

In 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden told a crowd of African Americans that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney wanted to “put you all back in chains.”

On black podcaster Charlamagne tha God’s audio town hall Tuesday night, Harris agreed with a caller who fretted former President Donald Trump will lock “anyone who doesn’t look white into camps.”

The vice president’s response was no John McCain 2008. Instead, she said, “You’ve hit on a really important point and expressed it I think so well.”

Harris went on to feed fear that Trump might throw black people back in chains like her Democrat predecessor did to win the 2012 election. The vice president used Trump’s activism on behalf of an Ohio town overwhelmed by Haitian immigrants as evidence of his supposed Hitler-style solution.

“This is yet another example,” she said. “Look what he did in saying that those legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their pets.”

Harris was referencing Trump’s comments about the more than 20,000 Haitians now living in the central Ohio blue-collar town.

“They’re eating the dogs!” Trump said on the presidential debate stage last month. “They’re eating the cats … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

The Federalist had just exclusively published an August phone call to Springfield an hour before the debate in which a man said he witnessed four Haitians each carrying a dead goose.

“I was trying to get my phone out and I was trying to make it to this orientation on time,” the caller said. (Audio of the call can be found here.) “I’m time crunching here, and I saw that, I’m like, ‘Yeah this has got to be reported.’”

The Haitians with the geese were apparently gone by the time police arrived, but the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) confirmed days after the Trump-Harris forum that a second call to authorities was placed in March.

“The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Wildlife has a dedicated wildlife officer assigned to Clark County who routinely monitors Snyder Park in Springfield because it is a popular fishing area,” a statement from the agency said. “That Wildlife Officer received calls on two separate occasions from people who reported witnessing individuals of Haitian descent taking waterfowl out of Snyder Park.”

Trump has never said anything about enslaving black people, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats from peddling fear about the former president plotting genocide even following two assassination attempts.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.