Right-of-center groups and individuals that don’t usually agree on much have been delivering the same warning to former President Donald Trump: Shut up about Vice President Kamala Harris’s race and stick to attacking her on policy.
Yet they cannot hide what everyone knows to be true: Harris is the ultimate DEI candidate. Candidate Joe Biden chose her as his running mate in 2020 because she is a black woman, and she ascended to the apex of national politics due to her race and sex.
Just as important, DEI is policy for Harris and the administration in which she serves. The Biden-Harris open-border devastation stems from a fundamental DEI concept: that it’s racist to protect America’s borders — and citizens — from illegal migrants who are overwhelmingly not white, and that Trump is cruel and racist for having done so and promising to do so again. Hence, with Harris as the Biden administration’s border czar, an estimated 10 million foreign citizens have been allowed to illegally enter this country.
On other issues ranging from crime to education to military readiness, Democrats have adopted DEI policies and practices and made this country worse. On day one of the Biden-Harris administration, the White House proclaimed a new “whole-of-government” agenda focused on “advancing racial equity.” In case there was any confusion, Harris had helpfully explained in the 2020 elections that equity means mandating equal results, not offering equal opportunity.
Fast forward to 2024, and Harris’s choice of Walz as her running mate demonstrates continued fealty to DEI ideology. As governor of Minnesota, he made illegal migrants eligible for health care, college tuition, and driver’s licenses — courtesy of his state’s taxpayers. Meanwhile, a top contender as Harris’s running mate, Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania, drew vehement objections from the pro-Palestinian wing of the Democratic Party over his pro-Israel positions.
Did Shapiro’s condemnation of antisemitic riots and support for Israel cost him a chance to be the Democrats’ vice-presidential pick? Maybe. What is certain is that Harris and Walz, and their party, have rationalized and encouraged both race-based violence and the DEI ideology that feeds it.
While the politics of the Middle East are complicated, the perverse, uncontained antisemitism that exploded on college campuses across America last fall drew inspiration and justification from a simple concept: Violence in pursuit of so-called racial or social justice is acceptable. This same concept fueled the George Floyd riots of 2020 — for which Walz’s state served as ground zero — and empowered the dramatic expansion of DEI bureaucracies afterwards in academia, government, and corporate America.
Walz is one of DEI’s biggest apologists. After Floyd’s death in May 2020, Black Lives Matter (BLM) race riots ravaged Minneapolis. Although the city’s Democrat mayor requested that Walz send in the National Guard, Walz was immobilized by fear and indecision. Minneapolis burned for three days while he dithered.
As Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald has documented, Walz apologized — to the rioters — for his white privilege. It was a grotesque display of cowardice and failure in leadership, and leftist politicians across the country engaged in the same. Harris herself promoted a fund to bail out violent rioters.
The bloody riots fueled the rise of the “Defund the Police” movement and popularized the dangerous notion that it is racist for cops to uphold law and order. Policies implemented on this premise led to dangerously under-resourced police departments, and the rampant crime that followed led even black Democrat mayors in America’s largest cities to call for “refunding the police” just two years later.
In Oakland, California, where Harris was born and launched her 2020 presidential campaign, crime became so widespread that the local branch of the NAACP last year denounced the city’s failed leadership and the movement to defund the police, noting that the public safety crisis “overwhelmingly affects minority communities.”
Neither Trump nor his allies should be afraid to attack the moral bankruptcy of DEI that has fueled the Biden-Harris policy disasters. That does not mean those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the convoluted and controversial nature of race or sex politics should seek out opportunities to pontificate publicly. It does mean that the appropriate surrogates should be prepared to attack DEI ideology and the DEI candidate.
When Trump triggered much outrage at the recent National Association for Black Journalists conference by suggesting that Harris leans into her two racial sides (black and Indian) depending on which benefits her most at the moment, perhaps someone on Team Trump should have pointed out that, four years ago, no one on the DEI-obsessed left was clamoring for their vice president to be an Indian woman.
Harris’s DEI status — and her DEI worship — are her weakness, not Trump’s.
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