OPINION:
Vice President Kamala Harris is running a nearly flawless Potemkin village campaign. As she traffics in illusions and lies, she is savaging America’s electoral process while setting this nation up for a likely economic collapse, possible world war and certain socialist coup.
Does anyone now doubt President Biden was Ms. Harris’ front man and fall guy in her Potemkin village plan to deprive voters of the traditional vetting in a primary election?
As Ms. Harris’ front man, Mr. Biden cleared the primary field. Thus, the Democrats avoided publicly washing their radical policy linen, which would have otherwise been hung up for voters to recoil at.
When the fall guy, Mr. Biden, fell, Ms. Harris was the biggest beneficiary. If forced into a contested primary, Ms. Harris would have easily taken the favored pole position as the most radical in the bunch. Of forced to reiterate her radical positions, she would have been left unable to run her flip-flopping Potemkin village con.
For those unfamiliar with the Potemkin analogy, in the 18th century, Russian field marshal Grigory Potemkin put prosperous facades on impoverished villages along the Dnieper River. He sought to deceive Catherine the Great when she visited this newly conquered land.
Today, Ms. Harris and her own field marshals are seeking to create the illusion that America is doing just fine. Whatever doubts anyone might have will be erased with a Harris plan. Yet that plan pays far more homage to the Wizard of Oz than any detailed policy platform.
Ms. Harris now flits from artificially packed arena to arena to spread her illusions while dodging even the friendliest press. Ms. Harris’ primary weapons in her hermetically sealed disinformation war are a teleprompter, which she reads like a CNN pro, and poll-driven messaging, which she delivers as convincingly as any con artist.
Ms. Harris’ slogan “we’re not going back” ranks at the top of her Potemkin pyramid. Americans would love to go back to the days of Donald Trump’s presidency when they were secure and prosperous. Yet Ms. Harris still mouths this slogan to paradoxically position herself as “the change candidate” when everything that needs to be changed has been Ms. Harris’ fault.
Ms. Harris calls for unity and an end to divisive rhetoric in her poll-driven messaging. In the same breath, she savages former President Donald Trump. Ms. Harris dismisses Mr. Trump’s deplorable followers as deplorable savages.
Ms. Harris likewise promises to dramatically increase the number of Border Patrol agents. She’s betting voters will forget she refused to accept her role as Mr. Biden’s border czar and likened Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the Ku Klux Klan.
Ms. Harris not only says she owns a gun but will shoot anybody who breaks into her mansion. She’s certain we will all forget her support for mandatory gun buybacks and other desecrations of the Second Amendment.
Ms. Harris assures us she has a plan to control inflation, reduce mortgage rates and increase homeownership. It’s the most jarring of Potemkin facades, as Ms. Harris herself started the inflation ball rolling with her tie-breaking votes in the Senate on two of the biggest budget-busting, inflationary bills in our nation’s history — never mind her full-throated support of “Bidenomics.”
Ms. Harris revels in beating Mr. Trump with the cudgel of Project 2025. She knows Mr. Trump had nothing to do with it and has repeatedly disavowed it. Yet as she channels “say it enough they’ll believe it” Goebbels, she says it anyway — without the hint or threat of a fact check by fact-checkers such as Politifact and The Washington Post that hound Mr. Trump.
As the Gaza Strip and Beirut burn and China-supplied Iranian rockets glare, Ms. Harris likewise assures us she is a friend of Israel, hoping we’ll forget her snub of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and her threats to deny Israel the weapons it needs to keep Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis at bay. No antisemitism to see here as Ms. Harris refuses to condemn the Palestinian demonstrators shutting down our streets and schools and defacing our statues.
Informed voters know it’s a pack of lies. Yet Ms. Harris’ Potemkin village campaign is working enough with low-information voters to move the presidential election into a dead heat rather than the Trump landslide that would otherwise result had the radical Harris agenda had been properly vetted by voters in a primary campaign.
The mainstream media are fully complicit. Kamala’s co-conspirators include ABC’s David Muir, Linsey Davis and Jon Karl; Bloomberg’s Jonathan Capehart and Michael Bloomberg himself; CBS’ John Dickerson and Margaret Brennan; CNN’s Brianna Keilar, Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace; Whoopi Goldberg and “The View”; MSNBC’s “Morning Joe and Mika,” Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid and Ali Velshi; PBS’ Judy Woodruff; and liberal comedians Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher.
Each of these elites intentionally ignored the cognitive decline of Mr. Biden and the inevitability of his replacement. Collectively, they see and hear no evil — shame on you, Oprah — as Ms. Harris plays out her Potemkin village gambit and dodges each of them. And let’s remember that ABC’s matador, George Stephanopoulos, drove home the final thrust of the sword to kill the Biden bull.
Will the first American legacy media reporter willing to expose Kamala Harris and her Potemkin village illusions please turn the lights of democracy back on? And please do it before Election Day — if not for Donald Trump, then for our Founding Fathers.
• Peter Navarro served as trade and manufacturing czar in the Trump White House and is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Platform.” Find him at www.substack.com/navarro.
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