Kamala Harris’ Record Shows She Hates America

At a campaign rally in Wisconsin last week with former Rep. Liz Cheney, Vice President Kamala Harris opened by saying, “we love America.” She repeated the phrase several times, emphasizing that what brought her and Cheney together is a love for country that transcends partisan politics. 

Set aside whether the endorsement of Cheney matters at all to voters in either party. Her neocon Never-Trump brand of Republican politics is repugnant to most GOP voters, and Democrats have long denounced her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as a war criminal.

No one cares about the Cheney family’s endorsement of Harris. The more important question is: does Harris really love America?

Her record suggests she does not, and that in fact she hates America.

Consider what Harris said about America when the New York Times launched its 1619 Project back in 2019. She called it “a masterpiece” and endorsed its central thesis, saying, “We must speak this truth: the very foundation of our country was built on the backs of enslaved people.”

Recall that the entire purpose of the 1619 Project was to “reframe the country’s history” by placing slavery “at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The project began with the false claim the “true founding” of America was not 1776 but 1619, when African slaves were first brought to North America. The essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones that launched the 1619 Project made a number of outlandish and quickly debunked historical assertions, like the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery and the American Founders didn’t really believe in the ideals they espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The 1619 Project, in other words, is deeply anti-American. It asserts the American experiment in self-government was intrinsically evil, corrupt, and disingenuous from the beginning. To the extent Harris endorses that view of America’s history and Founding, it calls into question whether she really does “love America” as she claims.

This is a pattern with Harris. Consistent with her endorsement of the anti-American 1619 Project is her support for reparations. During her brief presidential campaign in 2020, Harris pledged — to none other than race-hustler Al Sharpton, at a conference of black activists — to sign a bill authorizing a federal study of reparations for descendants of slaves.

If you thought Harris’ radicals views about America’s Founding and our history with slavery might also entail radical views of our Constitution, you’d be right. During the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris repeatedly laid out a vision of executive power that makes a mockery of the Constitution’s separation of powers. She promised “executive action” on gun control if Congress didn’t pass federal legislation to her liking within 100 days of taking office. She said the same thing about drug prices, as if she would have to power to act on her own to create law if Congress didn’t do as she ordered.

In fact, on a host of issues she promised to wield legislative powers from the White House, the Constitution be damned. On immigration, Harris vowed to implement DAPA, which was blocked by the courts under the Obama administration. On abortion, she promised to use the Justice Department for a system modeled on the Voting Rights Act that would force states and localities that she deemed to have a history of violating Roe v. Wade to obtain approval from the DOJ before any abortion law or regulation could take effect.

She had a bunch of proposals like that in 2020, all of them totally unconstitutional. During one of the Democratic primary debates, the moderator mentioned that Joe Biden had previously warned about the limits of executive power when it came to something like gun control, and asked Harris for a response. She quipped, “Well, I mean, I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying, no, we can’t, let’s say yes, we can.”

Harris’ disdain for the Constitution is matched by her disdain for law and order during the BLM riots in the summer of 2020. She infamously helped raise money to bail out those arrested for rioting and looting, saying, “The people’s voices must be heard.” Of the protests themselves, which were premised on the false narrative that police unfairly and disproportionately target black Americans, Harris said they were “an essential evolution in our country,” and “a mark of a real democracy.”

Maybe somewhere deep down Harris really does love America, or some potential future version of America. But it’s clear from her record that she doesn’t love anything about America’s past and has at least a very dim view of America’s present. It’s also clear that she wants above all to transform America into a post-constitutional leftist oligarchy ruled by people like her.

There are different ways to describe what all that adds up to, but none of them amount anything close to love for America. Harris can insist all she wants on the campaign trail that she “loves America,” but her past statements and policy agenda shows she actually hates it.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.