Category: Kamala Harris

Lauren Martinchek Nails It

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Wow, I was knocked out by this young radical’s take:

Well, it’s official.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has now officially accepted the nomination of the democratic party to be President of the United States.
You would think that after months of preparation knowing that this would happen, I would be beyond the point where it bothers me. But at this moment in time, I’ve begun to realize my frustration doesn’t come from a place of simply being disappointed. Rather, it stems from the fact that democrats have opted to coalesce around a candidate that they did not even like.
This genuinely doesn’t even have to do with Bernie. Of course, there’s a part of me that will never, ever forget the fact that after the tens of thousands of text messages I sent, the money donated, and the time and effort I and millions of other people contributed in order to help organize the Sanders campaign, Barack Obama was waiting for just the right moment to destroy everything that we had built and worked so hard for. On top of it, we’re told to sit down, shut up, be gracious in our “defeat”, and turn that energy towards electing Biden. Of course, there’s a part of me that will never get over the fact that democrats worked harder to stop a campaign that just wanted everyone to have decent wages and healthcare than they ever have to stop Donald Trump or the republican party, and I genuinely have not been the same since I watched it happen. All that being said however, I can’t help wondering about the consequences of doing all this just to effectively anoint a man who they never even had any confidence in to begin with. . . .

Read the whole thing, and keep in mind that the writer is the real deal — a genuine member of the proletariat, small-town white working class — and the bold clarity of her writing is remarkable.

After reading her take on the Biden nomination (via Instapundit), I immediately began researching Ms. Martinchek, including the old essays she wrote in college (she’s a recent graduate of SUNY-Plattsburgh), and also followed her on Twitter. Damn, she hits hard.

Here’s the thing: Ms. Martinchek’s foreboding of doom about the Biden campaign reminds me very much of how I felt about John McCain 12 years ago, or Mitt Romney eight years ago. You say, “But she’s so far left, Stacy. She’s hopeless.” And perhaps so. However, she seems smart enough to perceive certain basic errors of the command economy.

Anybody who hates Andrew Cuomo that much can’t be all bad.




 

‘She Ain’t Us’: How the #ADOS Attack Undermines ‘Phony’ Kamala

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Right out of the box, the Trump campaign was ready with a 30-second ad attacking Joe Biden’s VP choice Kamala Harris as “phony,” which shows that someone at Trump HQ has been paying attention to the nuances of African American culture. Because one of the things that caused Harris to lose support in the Democratic primaries was the realization by black voters that, as several have said, “She ain’t us.”

ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) is a category described by black podcasters Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore. It refers to the distinction between someone like Barack Obama (whose mother was white and whose father was Kenyan) and someone whose ancestors were enslaved in America. While this distinction may not seem important to most white people, it means a lot to black Americans who have noticed the way in which elite institutions (e.g., Ivy League universities) engage in what might be called substitute tokenism to meet the necessary “diversity” quotas. From the perspective of “diversity” managers, one brown face is the same as the other, but from the perspective of struggling African-Americans, the white system is not doing them any favors by giving scholarships to the children of immigrants merely for the sake of having more brown faces on campus.

As I say, white people don’t generally understand why the ADOS distinction matters, but it expresses a sense among many black people that “diversity” is fraud being perpetrated at the expense of their community — and I don’t disagree with that analysis. Even though I dislike the whole zero-sum-game mentality of identity politics, where everything must be carved up and allotted by quotas of “representation,” if such a racial spoils system is to exist, at least it ought to be internally consistent, and counting the child of foreign immigrants as “African American” for the sake of a racial quota is a swindle.

Kamala Harris’s father is from Jamaica and her mother is from India. How many African Americans have a mother named Shyamala Gopalan? Harris was born while her parents were attending UC-Berkeley; they divorced when she was 7 and she was raised in Quebec, returning to the U.S. for college. So while it is perfectly acceptable to celebrate Harris as an immigrant success story, her status as a “woman of color” does not signify any actual benefit to the African-American community.

Go check out the #ADOS hashtag on Twitter and you’ll discover an extensive discourse on this topic. It’s not coming from Republicans or conservatives, but from black people who feel they are being defrauded by the game of substitute tokenism that Harris represents. So when the Trump campaign runs an ad calling Harris a “phony,” that message is going to resonate with a crucial demographic segment.