George Orwell on Kamala Harris

1,524 words

Vice President Kamala Harris is a vacuous twit.

People on the Right know this. People in the center, independents, and the unaligned know this as well. It’s obvious. When she was selected to run against Donald Trump after Joe Biden’s humiliating exit from the race this past July, this woman did not speak to a largely friendly press for weeks. And once she did, the results were often cringeworthy. From her uncontrolled cackling, to her awkwardly sipping a beer on late-night television, to her fake Jamaican accent, to her admitting on The View that she would not have done anything differently than Joe Biden these past three years, the woman has become a laughing stock.

This is largely because she cannot speak well extemporaneously. I will argue that is the result of her not being able to think well extemporaneously. Hence the term vacuous.

Note one of her more recent failures. When being interviewed by Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, Whitaker expressed skepticism regarding the current administration’s ability to influence Israel during its latest war with the Palestinians. In response, Kamala coughed up this gooey nugget:

Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.

This convoluted mess of passive tense pap took the Vice President of the United States around 21 seconds to say. This was because she struggled to say it. She had to pause at least five times to collect her thoughts before linking one vague, meaningless phrase to the next. Without a teleprompter or a script she can memorize, Kamala Harris is at best a subpar public speaker when answering difficult questions—although this clip from the 60 Minutes interview makes her seem far worse than that.

This aired Sunday, October 6th. Yet when CBS re-broadcast the interview the following night, the footage was edited, and Kamala’s response was now this:

We’re not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.

Better. More forceful. But still not great, given that she’s dodging a specific question with what is effectively sloganeering or cant. Whatever on that. It’s no secret that Kamala Harris is not terribly bright. Whatever also on the mendacity of CBS and its brazen attempts at election interference. We all know these people are not honest and will distort the news for the sake of power. Yes, they should be held accountable for it—prosecuted, even—but I will let Jesse Watters and others on the mainstream Right take CBS and 60 Minutes to task for all of this. They can do a better job of it than I can anyway.

What I would like to do, however, is invoke George Orwell to show what a poor thinker Kamala Harris really is. In his classic essay Politics and the English Language Orwell demonstrates how sloppy writing results from sloppy thinking. The same, I believe, can be said for sloppy speech, which, according to Orwell, is quite common in politics:

This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

And these phrases, of course, often don’t even belong to the writer or speaker. They have been expressed countless times by others. Orwell provides examples of “worn-out metaphors” such as “toe the line,” “ride roughshod over,” and “stand shoulder to shoulder with.” Kamala’s answer doesn’t even rise to this level, and instead is thoroughly ordinary and forgettable. It’s as if she has not read enough to internalize clichés. Not only is her answer a buffet of platitudes, but the bins are mostly empty as well.

Another linguistic sin Orwell discusses is expanding verbs into phrases and nouns into noun constructions in order to make it seem as if you have more to say than you actually do. This works well with the passive tense which also expends more words than its opposite. In response to Whitaker’s comment that it seems as if Israeli Prime Minister is not listening to the United States, the best and most appropriate response would have been, “We have made him listen.”

This four-word sentence perfectly matches the sputtering thrust of what Kamala actually said, while being active, forceful, and not wasting the listener’s time with drivel and circular logic. Yet, it would have been impossible for Kamala to utter anything remotely similar to that because it simply isn’t true. Since the war began, Israel has not been listening in any meaningful way to the Biden administration. Everyone knows this, including Kamala.

And this leads us to another dictum of Orwell’s: that sloppy, inflated writing is often a disguise for dishonesty.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as if were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

I could go on, of course. Yes, it should be noted that Orwell was less forgiving of bad language than what would seem appropriate in this case because he was referring to writers, while Kamala was speaking off the cuff. Writers at least have the luxury of rewriting, and published authors (presumably) have editors. While fielding importunate questions from Bill Whitaker, Kamala had neither. Therefore, perhaps we should douse oil and vinegar all over Kamala’s word salad in order to imagine what the poor woman meant to say.

No, we shouldn’t. First, there is no mercy in politics. Any sign of weakness in one’s enemy should be immediately pounced upon—and Donald Trump seems to be doing a pretty good job of that. Second, Kamala or her team should have anticipated such a question, and clearly hadn’t. If Kamala Harris cannot prepare sufficiently for an interview on 60 Minutes—her home turf, no less—what faith do we have that she will prepare for her role as President of the United States? Third, she did have an editor. CBS edited her, and brazenly so. Has Kamala spoken out about this? Has she given any indication that she opposes such skullduggery? Of course, not.

This seemingly inconsequential episode does, however, reveal something profound about today’s politics. The people our media says are in charge are not in actually charge. Of course, we’ve known this ever since the Democrats stole the 2020 election and installed a senile Joe Biden in the Oval Office. In some sense, this has always been the case, since politicians by their very nature must comply with their donors or face career suicide. Yet, when a politician is keyed in to what a large segment of the people wants and has the charisma and energy to be loved by millions, then that politician has the political clout to push back a little against his donors. He can insert some of his own agenda into his politics and force the money men to tone down some of their requests if he is uncomfortable with them. What are the donor’s going to do? Ask for everything and risk losing a sure-fire win?

Within living memory, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump fit this bill—and Trump perhaps most so. This, I think, is what scares Democratic donors the most. Trump has a tendency of thinking for himself. Yes, this can lead to mistakes as well as to accomplishments, but at least these are in large part Trump’s mistakes and Trump’s accomplishments. This makes him somewhat unpredictable on certain crucial issues such as immigration and foreign wars (although, sadly, not on others, such as Israel). If anything, her recent interview on 60 Minutes proves that Kamala Harris cannot think for herself. This makes her predictable. She also does not possess a fraction of Trump’s charisma and energy. This makes her easier to control. She is, in effect, a sieve for the Democratic donor class.

If Kamala Harris gets installed as President in 2025, the far-left Democratic donors will continue to steer the flow of history. They will continue to use relatively superfluous agenda items such as abortion, health care, and socialist economics as ploys to push what they really want—increased warfare abroad and the death of the white majority in North America through rampant third-world immigration. And for this, they will demand absolute orthodoxy to leftist ideals from their politicians.

As Orwell states in Politics and the English Language: “Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”

Lifeless and imitative. Could that 60 Minutes clip have given us any other impression? It seems that for their nefarious purposes, the Democrat donors have selected the perfect candidate in Kamala Harris.