← Breaking History
Breaking History
Kamala Harris and the Election of Laughter and Forgetting (From the Honestly Archives)
00:42:36
Loading summary
Transcript49 lines
- [00:02]
Bari Weiss
From the Free Press, this is honestly and I'm Bari Weiss. Last month we ran an episode here by one of our amazing reporters, Eli Lake, that took us back to the tumultuous year of 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson dropped out of his own re election campaign and the resulting turmoil at the Democratic convention that summer in Chicago that followed. Now, at the time, of course, Joe Biden was still in the race and Eli was guiding us through that history lesson in order to help us make sense of the present moment and to indicate what might happen next. Today, Eli's back to do what he does like absolutely no one else to look back in time to help us make sense of our baffling present. The current Vice President Harris is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. She's got the wind at her back, though she hasn't given a single interview since she was named. And every day someone else announces that they've been co hosted coconut pilled. But in her anointment to the top of the ticket, there's been a strange and silent rewriting of history by the press and by party loyalists with the support of a lot of tech companies who are together changing our collective understanding of the present, but also of the very recent past. Today, Eli argues that this has happened before, and not in America, but in the Soviet Union and also in the works of brilliant writers including Milan Kundera and George Orwell, who imagines something, he argues, like what we're seeing right now. While that might sound like hyperbole, I urge you to listen to this episode and decide for yourself. Because whether or not you agree or disagree with Eli's conclusions, I can promise you that you will learn so much from listening to this episode. I'll speak personally. I thought I knew about this topic, but my mind was blown from what I learned and the way that Eli connected so many dots. A quick break and then we'll be back with Free Press reporter Eli Lake. Stay with us.
- [02:14]
Eli Lake
Can we take a minute to reflect on the last five weeks?
- [02:18]
Joe Biden
I'm not going anywhere. All right.
- [02:21]
Eli Lake
We started the summer with an 81 year old president that his advisors, his party and most of the legacy press insisted was sharp as ever.
- [02:31]
Bari Weiss
I can tell you that he is sharper than ever.
- [02:34]
Joe Biden
The Lord Almighty came down and said, joe, get out of the race. I get out of the race. The Lord Almighty's not coming down.
- [02:39]
Eli Lake
An assassin nearly murdered Donald Trump.
- [02:41]
Neil Ferguson
What happened?
- [02:44]
Eli Lake
Shooter is dead after a shocking assassination attempt on the former president in Pennsylvania yesterday afternoon.
- [02:51]
Joe Biden
Last week, I took a bullet for democracy.
- [02:55]
Eli Lake
And here we are in August, less than 100 days until the election.
- [02:59]
Joe Biden
So I've decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a.
- [03:02]
Eli Lake
New generation with a new Democratic nominee.
- [03:06]
Kamala Harris
You all helped us win in 2020, and we gonna do it again in.
- [03:09]
Eli Lake
2024. Who until two weeks ago was widely acknowledged as a political lightweight, a terrible manager. Most Americans say that they don't think you're doing a good job on the border. You and the administration and the author of Word that Strained comprehension.
- [03:30]
Kamala Harris
Well, I think culture is. It is a reflection of our moment in our time. Right and present culture is the way we express how we're feeling about the moment.
- [03:45]
Eli Lake
Oh, and there appears to be a revolution in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro says he will not hesitate to call for a new revolution.
- [03:53]
Bari Weiss
As the country's election results face international scrutiny.
- [03:56]
Eli Lake
A regional war possibly about to kick off in the middle. Tensions in the region are on the.
- [04:02]
Bari Weiss
Rise with Iran and its terror proxies vowing fierce revenge on Israel. The recent killings of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah.
- [04:10]
Eli Lake
And it's still unclear whether the elected president is running the country. The media, of course, is focusing all of us on what really matters. Brat girl, summer. That was the biggest story last week. Plus, JD Vance in 2021 insulted cat ladies on Tucker Carlson's program and he may or may not be a couch humper. So I want to salute the Associated Press for their report today. J.D. vance did not have sex with a couch. There's a lot going on in that headline. As Democrats all started saying last month, it's a little weird. And three days ago, the nation found out what we've all known in Minnesota. These guys are just weird. That's who they are. Every day, Vance, it comes out. Vance has done more extreme, more weird, more erratic. One of those things, of course, is pointing out the differences between these two candidates. I mean, on the other side, they're just weird. I mean, they really are. But this is not weird in the way the Democrats are now messaging. It's weird because the party is asking us to forget what they themselves were just saying. Overnight, the press went from picking Joe Biden apart as an out of touch, senile selfish old man to praising a great patriot who understood when it was time to exit, as if the same media wasn't pushing him off the stage. Am I the only one feeling the whiplash? We are now asked to consider the presidential race in terms of memes and gaffes and polls and focus groups, as if this was just another election year. We are also being asked to accept at face value and absurdity, that the president, too feeble to run for re election, is fit for the job he currently holds, and that his successor, who was widely understood as a drag on the ticket just a few weeks ago, is now the second coming of Barack Obama. Yes, exposing the big lie about Biden's mental acuity has spawned another lie about Kamala's political legitimacy, a candidate I'm sure you remember who canceled her first run for president in 2019 because she was polling so poorly in Iowa, a state where she held 87 separate campaign events, she failed to receive a single delegate. But never mind everything she said when she ran for president the first time, her commitment to ban fracking and abolish the agency in charge of protecting our border. Her aides tell us she has changed the surreal mood reminds me of the novels of Milan Kundera, the Czech dissident who captured with scathing wit the absurdist dimensions of the war the communist regime of his era waged against memory and history and traced the way public lies beget private ones until a whole society begins to see itself in the funhouse mirror of official distortion. In the first section of his novel the Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the main character of the story, a researcher named Mirek, realizes that he wishes to stamp out the memory of a distant affair with the same ruthlessness as the Communist Party that erases the photos of politicians who have fallen from favor. Mirik concludes that all political parties shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about. But the past is filled with life, and its continence is irritating, repellent, wounding to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history. That book, along with a few other works by great 20th century anti totalitarian rebels, will be our guide in this episode to make sense of this moment in history as the Democratic Party and Kamala herself ask us to imagine what will be unburdened by what has been. It will require much laughter and forgetting. Keep it locked Democrats say Kamala Harris is creating a new excitement for voters in Florida. They say this golf cart rally before we tell the story of the Kamalanan, we need to make something clear. America is not about to become a communist dystopia. The Democrats do not run gulags. There are no secret police knocking on the doors of dissidents in the dead of night. The sheer brutality of Kundera's Czechoslovakia, Czeslav Milos, Poland, or the Soviet empire that ruled them all and inspired George Orwell's Oceania are not analogous to America in 2024. But we should notice a conspicuous parallel, an echo, or perhaps a rhyme. Many of the intellectuals and journalists entrusted with sense making and truth telling for the last two years, with a few noble exceptions, have insisted Joe Biden was just fine. And when that gargantuan falsehood was no longer credible after the president's debate on June 27, the pundits, the politicians, the journalists, the people who are meant to convey reality to the rest of us have done their best to airbrush the entire episode away.
- [09:34]
Czeslaw Milosz
There are certain things that we now have in common with the late Soviet Union, and that includes a public incredulity. One of the striking features of late Soviet Russia was that nobody believed anything the party said. And cynicism, indeed a black humor about the propaganda was everywhere.
- [09:53]
Eli Lake
This is Free Press columnist and economic historian Neil Ferguson. He wrote a recent column exploring the parallels between America in 2024 and the late Soviet Union.
- [10:02]
Czeslaw Milosz
Whereas in late Soviet America, the media class, which is overwhelmingly democratic, and the academic class, which is overwhelmingly democratic, don't realize that really large portions of the population don't believe the propaganda. Joe Biden, the big lie was that he was sharp as attack. Then he had to very quickly become incapable of campaigning for another term, but still capable of being president. So sharp as a tack, sort of in one role, but completely gaga as a candidate. But the party had to do another heroic thing, which was to pretend that the DEI Vice President, Kamala Harris, was in fact the perfect candidate who would sweep to victory on November 5th.
- [10:56]
Eli Lake
Now, allow me to anticipate a fair objection. Politicians have lied and spun since time immemorial, that is true. And it would be weird for Democrats to not do their best to forget their troubles of July and focus on the future of November. But at least until fairly recently, we would not expect the press, the intellectuals, the analysts, the professors to enlist themselves in that project. And yet that is what has largely happened. Here is a snippet from the white Women for Kamala Harris event from last month.
- [11:31]
Bari Weiss
We are here because, as if you were here earlier, you've heard bipoc women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen, and get involved this election season. This is a really important time and we all need to use our voices and influence for the greater good. No matter who you are, you are all influencers in some way.
- [11:51]
Eli Lake
It's not just cringy YouTube videos and Zoom calls. Consider that Kamala Harris as vice president was put in charge of the border by Joe Biden in 2021. As a shorthand, we all called her the Border Czar at the time. It may not have been her official title, but it was basically true, quote, unquote, border Czar. Meantime, Vice president and Border czar Kamala Harris facing some background. And yet, almost as soon as Kamala ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, Axios, along with several other media outlets, not only stopped calling her the Border Czar, they claimed that calling her the Border Czar was Republican misinformation. Here is the headline from Axios. Harris Border confusion haunts her new campaign. The story goes on to say the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with a border czar title, which she never actually had. What he said about Harris and immigration was not true. She was never appointed border Czar. People gonna have to counter the misinformation. You already hear folks talking about the Border Czar. She wasn't the Border Czar. Now she wasn't the Border Czar. That's what Republicans. Okay, fine. But then an editor's note was appended to the story that said Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a border czar in 2021. As my eagle eyed Free Press colleague Peter Savotic wrote last month, there was something just more than a teensy bit Bolshevik about all of this. The piece of information that was once considered a fact, as in a week ago, has in the past 48 hours been deemed politically unhelpful. And so we're just going to make it disappear. Then there is fracking.
- [13:33]
Kamala Harris
There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking.
- [13:36]
Eli Lake
So yeah, and starting we learned recently from Harris campaign officials that her 2019 position in favor of banning fracking altogether has been reversed. Politicians flip flop all the time, but here is how the New York Times has covered the matter. Quote, the Harris campaign will rebut most of Republicans attacks by arguing that they are exaggerating or lying about her record, said a campaign official briefed on the plans who was not authorized to discuss them publicly. Her campaign plans to lean into her record as a local prosecutor and state attorney general to burnish her image as a candidate with deep ties to law enforcement. Now, I don't fault the reporter here for printing the Democratic Party spin the same article quotes Republican strategists on the hours and hours of video they have of Harris taking fringe progressive positions in 2019 and that they intend to exploit them. But what about the actual issue? Will Harris explain why she has changed her position on fracking in her own words and not those of an anonymous campaign official? Or does the whisper of this campaign aid end all discussion for the remainder of the 2024 election? I'd like to know. An old Soviet joke comes to mind. The future is always certain. It's the past that's always changing. And here we should introduce George Orwell. You probably know him for two of his novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, which rage against the solonism of his day. I recommend his essays. In this episode, we will focus on 1984. I don't want to spend too much time on the book itself, but it takes place in a future dystopian London, where the state controls all information and peers into the private homes of all citizens. The main character, Winston, is eventually arrested for letting it slip that he dislikes the ruling party. His head is placed inside a cage of rats that will eat his face off unless he asks his torture be applied to the woman he loves. He breaks and as a result, is broken as a man. Now, let me be clear. I don't think our government is going to place our heads in rat cages that will eat our faces off. But the reason I invoke 1984 is because elements of the novel help explain how vulnerable a society's history and memory is to the machinations of the ruling elite. In that respect, 1984 remains with us whether we like it or not. Phrases Orwell coined are now fixtures in the English language. The term memory hole was actually coined by Orwell in the book to describe the pneumatic tubes in the Ministry of Truth that whisk inconvenient history into a waiting furnace today. It's a useful phrase to explain the phenomenon we are living through, as in we have memory hold the fact that it's unclear who is running the US government in light of the President's mental and physical decline. In Orwell's novel, the state sought to tear human minds to pieces and put them together again in new shapes to their liking. This required memory holding, inconvenient text, banning subversive literature. And in the 20th century we saw real life versions of this. It was illegal in the Soviet Union, for example, to own a copy of Orwell's animal farm or 1984 North Korea, one of the few remaining Stalinist regimes that exist still bans, foreign magazines and books. In America, we are not suffering from a scarcity of information. In fact, we really have the opposite problem. We're drowning in information. The Internet offers an ocean of text, and we are forced to use search engines and AI tools to sift through it all. But we still face social pressures to Memory hold the recent past, and no one is immune, not even those tasked with holding the most powerful people to account today. The memory holders can try their best, but the Internet remembers anyone can still find the video of Kamala mouthing leftist pieties in 2019, when that was the lane she chose for the primaries that year. And yet, with so much information instantly available, the Internet platforms, the search engines, and those that create the algorithms to help us navigate the digital world can easily obscure recent history. The memory holes do not destroy the evidence of the past, but they can bury the evidence under a mountain of nonsense. Consider the recent kerfuffle about the ideological leanings for Senator Harris from GovTrack, a supposedly neutral website that just provides people with the basics on politicians. In 2019, Harris was ranked the most liberal senator in the Senate, but right after she ascended to her party's nominee, the website took the 2019 page offline, claiming a single year snapshot was not as accurate a rating of a senator's record as one over a two year period. Joshua Tauberer, the founder of GovTrack, later explained last month, when I saw earlier this week that attention was being directed to a part of our site that I had warned was not reliable, we took the single calendar year statistics off the site for the same reason, all of them and for all legislators. Make of that what you will. Then there's Google.
- [18:50]
Neil Ferguson
Google has been very bad.
- [18:52]
Joe Biden
They've been very irresponsible.
- [18:54]
Eli Lake
Last month, people began testing the autofill function for searches on Trump's assassination attempt, and the search engine would not complete Trump offering instead a little known attempt on President truman's life in 1960, which was foiled and happened 64 years ago. And while that is an interesting bit of history, it's pretty clear that most people would be searching for the assassination attempt that just happened, not one that dates back to the Eisenhower administration. Google, according to reports in several media outlets, assured us that this was not a manual fix to the search engine. Rather, we were told, it was a ghost in the machine, a program that sought to tamp down political violence in an election year. Make of that what you will. No institution in American life can succeed in literally erasing recent history after all, you can still find plenty on Google about Trump's near death experience if you're willing to type out the entire search term. But our academic culture certainly softens the ground for political lies to sprout, left or right. Personal narrative is prized over empirical facts and evidence in many fields today, and this has filtered downstream into our journalism culture and politics. We no longer talk about the truth. Instead, we talk about my truth. Can a majority of voters in a few swing states be persuaded to forget the unpleasantness of July? Perhaps the risk here is not that the truth in our open society will not eventually out. Rather, it is that the institutions we rely on to make sense of the world and tell us what we need to know, from the government to the press to public health officials, will lose their credibility. Or perhaps they already have. And this gets us back to the lying. It's one thing to fib here and there about a nominee's record. It's quite another to hide from the American people the mental decline of the President. Our Constitution invests enormous powers in that person. We vote every four years for the President specifically, not an unelected committee of advisors and cabinet secretaries. Now we should say it's not unprecedented for a president to hide his health conditions. Woodrow Wilson's wife, Edith, ran the government for the last year and a half of his second term after the president suffered a debilitating stroke. FDR's paraplegia was shrouded from the public as well. And of course we should never forget that Jack Kennedy's many medical maladies and dependence on painkillers was also kept under wraps. But here is the distinction. We all saw the stumbles. We all heard the slurs. It was obvious to anyone watching President Joe Biden in public events that he was declining. And yet his White House and allies in the media kept insisting this was all Republican spinning. When Biden was in Europe to mark the 80th anniversary of D Day in June and he looked dazed and vacant as he wandered aimlessly on a battlefield, Nicole Wallace of MSNBC told us not to believe our lying eyes.
- [22:01]
Bari Weiss
There's a growing and insidious trend in right wing media, broadcast, print and social media. It is to take highly misleading and selectively edited videos of President Biden directly from Republican National Committee social media accounts and then use those videos to spread messages virally to cast doubt on President Biden's fitness.
- [22:23]
Eli Lake
The memory holders pointed to the video and told us they were cheap fakes. To appreciate the absurdity of Nicole Wallace and her network, we have to run Through a little recent history, when Joe Biden decided to run in 2020 for the presidency, his age was already a big issue. You said they would have to buy.
- [22:43]
Joe Biden
In if she qualifies.
- [22:44]
Eli Lake
Are you forgetting what you said to me? That was a news clip from 2019. During the competitive phase of the Democratic Party primaries, Julian Castro, then a rising star in the party, suggested Biden may have forgotten his earlier statements about his healthcare proposal on stage at the debate. Oh, my heavens. Castro has since been memory hold. But the concern about Biden's age way back then when he looked very different than he does today, was enough of an issue that Biden himself promised voters in the 2020 campaign that he would be a one term transitional president.
- [23:22]
Joe Biden
Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country. They're the people who are going to.
- [23:36]
Eli Lake
So what exactly happened? Well, we still don't have a definitive answer. Perhaps it will emerge if the Democrats lose in November. But what I surmise is that after the 2022 midterm elections, where Democrats did much better than expected, Biden and the people around him fell victim to hubris, the vice of excessive pride. Maybe he was slowing down, but he could still win. And in that moment of hubris, the party came to accept the bonkers plan to run an octogenarian for a second term in 2024. There were many warning signs after the midterms. Remember Biden's bizarre fundraiser where he said he feared Vladimir Putin would actually use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, an admission that undermined American policy at the time to downplay these threats as Russian bluster. Incidents like this, though, were waved away. Biden's always been a blowhard, we were told, or as Nicole Wallace assured viewers, don't fall for the cheap fakes. But then in March, special prosecutor Robert her presented his report on Biden's retention of classified documents in his personal homes and a think tank office from his time as a senator and Vice president. Hur ended up declining prosecution because, quote, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him as a sympathetic, well meaning elderly man with a poor memory. It was worse than that, though. Hur's report asserts that Biden could not even remember the years when he was vice president. The fogginess we would see in glimpses in public appearances was now confirmed by the Justice Department. Twenty years ago, the Hur report would have sparked a useful crisis for Biden and his party. Perhaps Biden would have exited the race earlier, allowing time for a credible primary, but the White House doubled down.
- [25:34]
Kamala Harris
The way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated. Gratuitous.
- [25:49]
Eli Lake
Joe Biden himself held a press conference and he was feisty at first, but towards the end, he began to fade.
- [25:56]
Joe Biden
The conduct of the response in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip, has been over the top. I think that, as you know, initially the president of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him.
- [26:28]
Eli Lake
Sisi, we should say, is the president of Egypt, not Mexico. At this point, one might expect the press to stay on the story of the president's decline. And a handful of reporters really did stick with that story. The Wall Street Journal, to its immense credit, on June 4th published a devastating piece about Biden's performance in private meetings. Most of the Washington press corps, though, dismissed it as a hit piece driven by anonymous Republican whispers. Here's Morning Joe's response. They also called Mike Johnson, people around Mike Johnson and admit that this was basically House Republicans whacking. Why didn't they just ask? Marjorie Taylor Greene well, exactly why? Yeah, they could have. Lauren Boebert yeah, it's, it's really shocking, especially. But then came the June 27 debate and the lie was no longer sustainable.
- [27:21]
Joe Biden
Look, if we finally beat Medicare, and I'm going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border patrol and more asylum officers. President Trump, I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence.
- [27:42]
Eli Lake
I don't think he knows what he said either. Look, so how did the sense makers and truth tellers come to the point where their fidelity to their calling was overtaken by their loyalty to the Democratic Party? We'll find out after the break. Here we introduce our second guide, the Polish poet Czeslav Milosz. Milos is one of the rare heroes of the 20th century that endured the depravities and oppression of both the Soviets and the Nazis. His most famous work, a collection of essays called the Captive Mind, explains how the intellectuals of post war Poland seduced themselves to become foot soldiers in Stalin's war to erase national and individual identity. Quote, men will clutch illusions when they have nothing else to hold onto, he writes. This is a very different analysis than Orwell in 1984. Anyone even suspected of doubting the official lies of Big Brother risks torture and death. And one can understand that very few people would choose the truth over life itself. Milos, however, describes a more banal set of choices. I spoke to literary critic Adam Kirsch about his insights on the great master.
- [28:59]
Neil Ferguson
It's not really about toe the line or you'll get put in a gulag. It's more, how do you reason yourself into agreeing with what's happening and telling yourself that what's happening is good in some way or necessary in some way? You could say, I'm only interested in art and aesthetics. I'm not really interested in politics. I'm only going to think about poetry. Or I'm only interested in my own career. I'm going to do what's necessary for me to get ahead, to follow a career path. And it doesn't matter to me what everyone else is thinking and saying. I'm just sort of looking out for myself. And none of these are sort of obvious moral betrayals. None of them are people saying, I'm going to go do something bad. They're saying, I'm in this bad situation. I'm in a situation where there are no good choices and no good options. What's the least bad thing I can do? What he shows is that if society gets into a state where there are no good choices and where it's actually impossible or very dangerous to be completely honest, then people find ways to live in that society. Most people don't become dissidents. Most people don't become martyrs or truth tellers at the risk of everything that they have and their whole future. They find ways to accommodate. And he's talking about, these are the ways that people accommodate themselves to a regime based on lies. That's why they're captive minds. They're not just captive physically. It's not just that they are in prison. It's that they are allowing their minds to be taken captive by Stalinism.
- [30:18]
Eli Lake
In this respect, the intellectuals who contort themselves into party hacks in the captive mind are much more like the writers and thinkers today in America than we might think. Small social pressures can also drive people to lash themselves to big lies. So can catastrophization. If you believe, as many of the intellectuals skewered by Milos in the Captive minds did, that the alternative to Stalinism was Nazism, then one might get one's mind around supporting the persecution of counter revolutionaries. A mixture of catastrophization and stigmatization is at work at a place like msnbc. No one there would risk solitary confinement if they had said biden is too old to be president before the debate, but they wouldn't be called back as a guest. They may not be invited to the White House Christmas party. They could lose followers on X, and after all, if they acknowledged the obvious about Biden, then it would make Trump's path to the White House a little easier. This is particularly important in understanding our current moment, when a class of people believe that a single political opponent is the end of democracy itself. It provides a permission structure to support all kinds of measures that would be rejected out of hand if the consequences of an election were not so stark. It's hard to believe that The Democratic Party, for example, of 2004, would cheer on a rogue district attorney in New York to pursue a prosecution of George W. Bush based on a novel and ridiculous reading of federal and New York election law. This would be seen as election interference, not to mention a dangerous precedent. And yet the party cheered the convictions of Donald Trump this June in New York for exactly those kinds of charges. It became a kind of campaign ad. It was worth pursuing this authoritarian tactic of weaponizing the legal system against one's opposition because it meant keeping an authoritarian out of the White House. We can all relate to these subtle social pressures and rationalizations. It's a very human condition, but it nonetheless can lead to an intellectual's self erasure. I spoke with Jonathan Rosen, a Free Press contributing editor and author of the book the Best Minds, about the enduring relevance of Melosh's the Captive Mind. The most shocking thing about that book, when I read it many years ago, was that it wasn't that anyone was forcing writers to participate in the prevailing dishonesty. It was that they themselves collaborated in their own erasure. They thought they were giving themselves a voice in this new dispensation. But of course they were erasing themselves because the new dispensation was one of conformity and uniform conformity. All of this brings us back to where we started. Kamala Harris, the nominee who is winning every news cycle simply because the man she replaced on the ticket was too unthinkable. Even if that means memory holing the things we knew to be true only a couple of weeks ago and be.
- [33:22]
Kamala Harris
Unburdened by what has been. You know, what can be unburdened by what has been. There are those who who are unable to see what can be. But there are many more who are able to see what can be unburdened by what has been.
- [33:39]
Eli Lake
That is her signature phrase, and it's perfect. Kamala Harris can be the next president and save our country from Donald Trump. One just needs to unburden oneself of everything we know about Kamala Harris and how she came to be her party's nominee. Just imagine what can be unburdened by what has been. When I spoke with her Sunday, she said she wanted the opportunity to win the nomination on her own and to do so from the grassroots up, not top down. We deeply respected that, Hakeem and I did. She said she would work to earn the support of our party and boy has she done so in quick order. And that was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on July 23rd telling it like it isn't unburdened by what has just happened to tell us how he would like it to be. Vice President Harris wanted a competitive primary, he tells us, to take over from the man Democrats had already nominated in their own primary. And then, lo and behold, the grassroots of the party all got behind the vice president. In less than 48 hours, the Democratic National Committee has announced that Kamala Harris has now officially been nominated to lead the ticket. We have no idea how this process actually played out other than apparently there was a lot of texting, but it worked in a sense. There were no challengers last week. Two Harris's zoom nomination by the Democratic National Committee. More important, the press seems to have dropped their story and are incurious about how all of this went down. We might expect Schumer to tell us such a brazen lie, but why would the press or others in the party be so willing to go along with this gaslighting? Schumer's statement is remarkable when one considers that only two weeks before, many leading Democratic strategists were going on podcasts and television and writing columns that urged a competitive, albeit condensed, primary before the convention in Chicago this month. Until July 21, it was permissible for Democrats to acknowledge that Harris might be a very bad candidate in a general election. It was permissible to notice that Joe Biden was trapped by a selfish delusion that he could remain our president into his 86th year. Now Kamala Harris is a once in a generation political talent, and Joe Biden is the second coming of George Washington. To quote Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, what POTUS did last Sunday was humanly magnificent and morally extraordinary. And it was also spectacularly strategic. Years from now, historians will be searching for words to describe the Biden benediction. I wish Milan Kundera was alive to describe an historian who knows the future and a politician who's moved from the right side of history to the right side of the future. He knew from bitter experience not to trust such people, but he also knew that even those who resist the temptation to alter the past to conform to a promised utopia are flawed as well. In his book of Laughter and Forgetting, there are no dissident heroes. The protagonist of part one of that novel is ultimately arrested and imprisoned with his son for trying to retrieve photos of an affair with an ugly party functionary he had hoped to erase from his memory. In other words, he became a thought criminal because of his vanity. His resistance is quite literally a joke. But Kundera also understood that recognizing absurdity is itself a form of resistance, and that the best way to remain human when all the truth tellers and sense makers are spouting nonsense, is to laugh. So I will end this episode with a joke from the master. A man in Prague is vomiting in the middle of a town square. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head and says, I know what you mean. I have to believe that I'm not the only one who feels the same way. Everybody knows that the days are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody know.
- [38:22]
Bari Weiss
Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, if it made you think differently, if it provoked you, or if you just learned something new, all of that's the point. Share it with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own. Last but not least, if you want to support honestly, there's just one way to do it. It's by going to the Free Press's website@vfp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time.