Perhaps the greatest pretence at the Democratic National Convention is that Vice President Kamela Harris was the enthusiastic first choice of Democrats across the land to be their presidential candidate. In reality, she received not a single vote from the more than 16 million registered Democrats participating in this year’s nation-wide primaries and caucuses. Back in 2020, moreover, her hapless presidential campaign did not survive to the first primary. So, let the pretending begin.

It was, of course, Joe Biden who won 87 per cent of the vote in the 2024 Democratic primaries. The party machine, back in 2015-16, held that Biden should not run against the bumptious Donald Trump, preferring instead a woman, Hillary Clinton, to do the job. Four years later, however, the powers-that-be decided that the folksy Biden, though in the early stages of cognitive decline, was better suited to defeat Trump than the avowedly leftist Bernie Sanders.

The Age of Covid allowed the party management to hide their candidate from public scrutiny for the duration of the campaign. Once in office, Biden’s senility was covered up by the Democratic apparatchiks who have ruled the United States since January 2021. The mainstream media bought into the lie that a man named Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. became the Commander-in-Chief of of the United States of America. The game, however, was up on 28 June after Biden’s bewildered and bewildering performance in the television debate with Trump. America’s oligarchy had some hard decisions to make.

Playing along with the Biden-is-in-charge charade was none other than Vice-President Harris, formerly District Attorney of San Francisco, Attorney General of California and US Senator from California. Harris had been the party machine’s diversity, equity and inclusion pick to be Biden’s running mate in 2020. Though Kamala Devi Harris previously identified as an Indian Hindu, by 2020 she had transitioned to a proud African-American woman. A smart move. Republicans, especially Trump, are lambasted by the establishment media for calling Harris a ‘DEI pick’ and yet DEI choices – according to the ideology commandeering the Democratic party – is a good thing. We shall just have to pretend there is no contradiction in that.

Harris defended Biden’s mental acuity right up until, well, right up until the party elders decided he was too senescent in the eyes of the public. The faceless men and women who currently run America had other replacements in mind for Slow Joe than the openly disparaged Harris, but Biden, in a single-digit salute to his handlers, endorsed Harris after he was made to exit the race. In a televised message to the outside world, Biden declared that she was an ‘extraordinary partner’. The putative Potus’s performance had all the hallmarks of a hostage outsmarting his captors.

Now the faceless men and women running the Democratic party – along with their media enablers – had the Herculean task of transforming the public perception of Kamala Harris from a frivolous mediocrity into a charismatic political heavyweight. She is tough on law and order. She is an African-American woman. She is ‘joyful’. Moreover, she bears no responsibility for any of the perceived failures of the Biden administration. It was worth a shot.

Trouble is, she used her vice-presidential imprimatur to push Biden’s early economic policies through the Senate, and Americans are aghast at the effects of Bidenflation. Regular people are no less appalled at the influx of between ten and twenty million illegal immigrants across the southern border since January 2021, taking jobs from citizens and putting a downward pressure on wages. yet the Democratic machine keeps insisting Kamala Harris was ‘not Biden’s Border Czar’.

Some embrace wokeism as a Northern Star to replace Christianity as their religion, others as a guiding light to make their way in the world. Harris belongs to the latter category. Both she and her running mate, Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota since 2019, are PC fundamentalists, Harris because it represents her ticket to success, and Walz because,  I imagine, he actually believes identity politics is an emancipatory project.

Their radicalism is easily proven. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death on Monday, 25 May, 2020, Governor Walz allowed districts of Minneapolis to be burnt to the ground by the BLM from Tuesday, 26 May, until Sunday, 31 May. The fact-checkers in the mainstream media blame everyone else, including the mayor of Minneapolis, for this once-in-a-century hellscape and the non-appearance of the National Guard. The more likely culprit, I submit, is Minnesota’s Governor Walz and his BLM sympathies.

Pointedly, at the time then-Senator Harris pleaded with the American people to donate money to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to pay for the bail of BLM and Antifa activists. This was what she tweeted on the second day of the destruction of downtown Minnesota: ‘If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.’ Team Harris-Walz are regular folks. Of course.

Governor Walz’s radicalism is elsewhere evident in his support for full-term abortions and the termination of a surviving foetus/baby, tampons in boys’ school toilets, despotic restrictions during the Age of Covid (and a ‘snitch line’ to clamp down on dissenters), a close political alliance with Ilhan Abdullahi Omar, the Somali-Islamist politician representing Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, as well as in his apologetics for the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 4 June, 1989. The Democratic party’s spin doctors are currently depicting J.D. Vance as ‘weird’ – and, let’s face it, most politicians are – but Harris and Walz are something more than weird. They are bona fide radicals.

Radicalism, even of the wokeist variety, will only take you so far in politics. Regular Americans, from my experience, are not radical. They are, for the want of a better term, ‘normal’. And so it is that the Democratic party machine has been desperate to depict Harris as joyful and Walz as folksy. The down-home Tim Walz has, throughout the years, identified himself as a Minnesota National Guardsmen who served ‘in battle’. Kamala Harris, analogously, identifies herself as African-American. All lies. The 5 November general election, I predict, is when the great pretenders will be mugged by reality.