Harm Reduction

Posted on August 3, 2024 by Luke Ford

Wikipedia notes: “The harm principle holds that the actions of individuals should be limited only to prevent harm to other individuals.”

I’ve loved some of my cars and I’ve felt like they were an extension of me. Any harm to these vehicles felt like a harm to me.

Wikipedia notes:

Harm reduction, or harm minimization, refers to a range of intentional practices and public health policies designed to lessen the negative social and/or physical consequences associated with various human behaviors, both legal and illegal. Harm reduction is used to decrease negative consequences of recreational drug use and sexual activity without requiring abstinence, recognizing that those unable or unwilling to stop can still make positive change to protect themselves and others.

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:

* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.

* We now believe our freedom ends only at others’ noses. But pre-moderns saw things, and had to see things, very differently. That deviant conduct created no tangible harms and transpired out of sight was not dispositive because facially private misconduct was a transgression, not only against others’ sensibilities, but also against the order of things. Given that everyone’s place in this order depended on its continued sustenance, a transgression against it was a transgression against all.

* Steven Smith observes that the harm-principle—according to which the state may only regulate harmful as opposed to merely immoral conduct—has served as “a trusty weapon in the arsenal of liberalism.”22Though conservative defenders of liberty-restricting legislation have sometimes acceded to the principle’s premises and emphasized the harmful “secondary effects” of facially harmless conduct—e.g., pornography’s contribution to urban blight—these arguments have generally been ineffectual, and are also suspected as disingenuous rationalizations for moralistic motivations. Thus, in practice the harm-principle has nearly always yielded liberal prescriptions.

* Much of the legislation that liberals would veto under the harm-principle as unduly coercive can be defended as a response to the “psychic harm” and “communal harm” which the targeted conduct obviously causes. After all, “psychic distress is a kind of mental pain” and “is plainly something that people prefer to avoid.”24There is thus an obvious sense in which conduct that causes it—like the consumption or dissemination of pornography—is “harmful” and falls within the ambit of the harm-principle, irrespective of secondary effects. The same holds true of communal harm: “If people get satisfaction or happiness from living in a particular kind of community, then conduct that subverts that kind of community and thus reduces such happiness inflicts a kind of ‘harm.’

* The triumph of the harm principle is a merely rhetorical triumph, however. For liberals have by “sleight of hand” engaged in “rampant equivocation, trading on more ordinary senses of ‘harm’ for rhetorical purposes while importing technical or artificial conceptions of ‘harm’ in order to secure their desired conclusions.” They have “rigged” the concept of harm by exploiting its commonsense “subject-oriented” meaning—which includes psychic and communal harms—in order to establish the harm-principle’s commonsense rhetorical appeal while then narrowing its application to physical invasions of others’ autonomy when dealing with specific controversies, thus securing liberal outcomes. Liberals are thus “like people who insist that an issue should be resolved by democratic vote while working behind the scenes to disenfranchise groups who might be inclined to vote against their cause.” Their professions to the contrary notwithstanding, liberals do impose their values on others, because their tendentious conception of harm disguises the “quintessentially illiberal practice of treating some people’s ideas of the good life as less worthy,” concealing “how harm principle rhetoric actually works to obfuscate the deeper issues, to conceal real injuries, and to marginalize some conceptions of the good life.”

* Amy Wax observes that rationalistic liberals are unmoved and unimpressed by social conservatives’ “[v]ague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of the social order, which they dismiss as “an inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires.” And this is because they understand these vague premonitions as symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility, which cannot be allowed interfere with modern “fulfillment.” Hence Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, where he argued that homosexuality in and of itself “involves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one’s value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest.” This is how moral opposition to homosexuality must be conceived within a strategic perspective—as mere Hobbesian “annoyance” rather than some disequilibrium in the order of things. Thus understood, the desire to regulate others’ unobtrusive personal conduct out of concern for the “moral fiber of society” is a disingenuous gambit to arrogate state power in the service of merely personal preferences.

* If the desire to place a crèche on public property is a purely symbolic aspiration, then so too is the desire to remove it.

* What some women will dismiss as harmless sexual innuendo acknowledging the basic fact of animal attraction may be experienced by feminists as a denial of their personhood, a degrading fall from the lofty heights of that personhood into merely animal passions.

* [Dan Kahan writes in The Cognitively Illiberal State:] “We moderns are no less disposed to believe that moral transgressions threaten societal harm. This perception is not, as is conventionally supposed, a product of superstition or unreasoning faith in authority. Rather it is the predictable consequence of the limited state of any individual’s experience with natural and social causation, and the role that cultural commitments inevitably play in helping to compensate for this incompleteness in knowledge. What truly distinguishes ours from the premodern condition in this sense is not the advent of modern science; it is the multiplication of cultural worldviews, competition among which has generated historically unprecedented conflict over how to protect society from harm at the very same time that science has progressively enlarged our understandings of how our world works.”

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Feminism vs Tradition

Posted on August 3, 2024 by Luke Ford

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:

* For liberals’ concern with “substantive” equality inevitably draws them into the ambit of leftism, at which point they become no less willing to deploy state power to meddle with a wide array of social practices. Given that the “various maldistributions ”which concern liberals are only another name for what leftists call “social powers,” what get sold as limited correctives to isolated “kinks in the system” always harbor the seeds of leftist totalitarianism. Liberals claim to demand only a “level playing field.” But since there will always be another hither to undetected “maldistribution” waiting to be “discovered” by the anointed, liberalism must inevitably devolve into leftism, which is why conservatives often speak of “left-liberalism” or employ “liberalism” and “the left” interchangeably.

* AlanKors writes that “[d]espite the talk of ‘celebrating’ diversity, colleges and universities do not, in fact, mean the celebration, deep study, and appreciation of evangelical, fundamentalist, Protestant culture; nor of traditionalist Catholic culture; nor of the gender roles of Orthodox Jewish or of Shiite Islamic culture; nor of black American Pentacostal culture; nor of assimilation; nor of the white, rural South. These are not ‘multicultural.’”86Just like diversity, “sensitivity” is a facially universalistic ideal that is unobjectionable in the abstract. But Kors observes that universities’ solicitude for diverse group identities does not extend to those who reject the dominant dispensation. Campus speech codes protect the sensibilities of left-wing students, but they allow these same students to label conservative blacks “Uncle Toms” and label anti-feminist women “mall chicks.” Students who believe homosexuality is sinful can be charged with harassing their gay and lesbian cohorts. But pro-choice students who surround a silent pro-life vigil and chant “Racist, sexist, antigay born-again bigots go away” are seen as engaged in protected speech. Liberals ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the less fortunate, so Kors proposes the following thought-experiment:

“Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited “denigration” of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling “intimidated,” offended,” or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a “hostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic “loyalty oaths” where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that “minority” of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every “case” that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the “offender” or “victimizer,” desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester’s or a year’s reeducation in “religious sensitivity” or “patriotic sensitivity” seminars run by the university’s “Evangelical Center, “Patriotic Center,” or “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.”

If an “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance” sounds sinister and totalitarian, we might instead envision a new regime of diversity training that encourages incoming college freshmen to examine their conservaphobic prejudices and overcome these to the extent possible in a conservaphobic culture. The goal would not be political indoctrination. This conservative-friendly diversity training wouldn’t call on liberal students to become conservative any more than standard diversity training calls on straight students to become gay. They need only explore their latent fears and biases in order to create a more tolerant atmosphere for all students. But liberals will not accepteven this moderate solution. And this demonstrates to conservatives that they are unwilling to play by the same rules to which they hold others.

* radical feminists can treat the “social construction of gender” as established fact, and need not contend with the neuroscientists across campus who study the biological hard-wiring of sex differences. These scientists are not members of “the relevant discipline.” …unlike liberal academics, Christian fundamentalists do not have the privilege of exalting their own echo chambers as respected academic disciplines. Fundamentalists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of human beings in general are disdained as anti-intellectual. But feminists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of sex differences in particular are just being professional. Unlike fundamentalists, feminists have been culturally credentialed to disguise their hero-systems as disciplinary rigor. Having embraced the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, they have been credentialed as “the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful,” and so they are allowed to invent their own intellectual rules.

* progressives have “undermined manliness, feminized your culture, elevated fretful safety and excessive caution into virtues instead of weaknesses.”106Following Lakoff, liberals will diagnose the conservative invocation of manliness as yet another symptom of Strict Father morality, for which strict gender differentiation and masculine strength are how one defends “Moral Order” against a threatening world.107The Strict Father model, says Lakoff, “takes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.” And as liberals see it, this background view is really a pretext for conservative authoritarianism, which is sold to the public as a solution to dangers that liberals in their fretful safety and excessive caution refuse to confront. By contrast, conservatives see manliness as an anti-authoritarian impulse, a force that disrupts rather than upholds established convention. Harvey Mansfield writes that whereas rational control “wants our lives to be bound by rules,” manliness “is dissatisfied with whatever is merely legal or conventional.” Whilst rational control “wants peace, discounts risk, and prefers role models to heroes,” manliness “favors war, likes risk, and admires heroes,”109Manliness “seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.” It “tends to be insistent and intolerant,” just as it is “steadfast…taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one’s context, not being adaptive or flexible.” Manliness must “must prove itself and do so before an audience.” It seeks “to be theatrical, welcomes drama, and wants your attention.” By contrast, rational control “prefers routine and doesn’t like getting excited” and therefore aims to keep manliness “unemployed by means of measures that encourage or compel behavior intended to be lacking in drama.”113Manliness so conceived is the very antithesis of the buffered distance, a visceral rejection of its “ordering impulses.” It is most fundamentally a protest against the rationalizing forces of the modern world, against the peculiarly courtly rationality, which is what has made us “adaptive and flexible.” The liberal culture is unmanly because it is hostile, not only to actual contests of swords, but also to the entire range of virtues and identities which these once embodied—which is what the conservative celebration of manliness aims to resuscitate. Rather than pursuing the “new form of invulnerability” promised by the buffered distance, manliness embraces the vulnerability of the pre-modern dispensation, our exposure to the “anti-structure” that relativizes and destabilizes the conventional social world, revealing the precariousness of all merely human designs. As relative pre-moderns, conservatives are attuned to anti-structure—the inherent flux and fragility of all mortal things—as liberals are not, and this is why they think themselves more manly. This conception of manliness is part of what animates conservatives’ embrace of the free market, whose association with conservatism is not as obvious as it seems… These elements include the chaos, unpredictability, and insecurity of the pre-modern condition of porous selves opened out to anti-structure. These are what enable manliness and the anarchic will of free men. And it is these discounted values that imbue untrammeled laissez-faire with its existential resonance for conservatives. Laissez-faire symbolizes the anti-structure denied by the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, affirming our submersion in forces we do not control, our openness to powers that transcend our will and upset our designs. Liberals reject this openness as the relic of a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, which they in their superior enlightenment have overcome.. Cold War conservatives looked upon the Soviet Union and the welfare state as “the ultimate symbols of cold Enlightenment rationalism,” by contrast with which the free market stood as “the embodiment of the romantic counter-Enlightenment.”

* Feminism is a struggle, not by all women against male patriarchs, but by an elite minority of powerful women against a majority of women who never felt compromised by traditional gender roles.

* Feminists now dismiss traditional gender roles as arbitrary. But it was feminists who first engineered these perceptions by enforcing a regime of coerced androgyny. The feminization of men, writes Graglia, was among “the seeds from which women’s discontent grew and which blossomed into the women’s movement.” Absent the support and encouragement of a masculine man, women naturally became disenchanted with a traditional female role—feminism’s ultimate objective.101Theirdissatisfactionhere wasn’t just there waiting to be named by those who courageously spoke truth to power. Rather, it had to be created in order to socially vindicate the self-image of an elite minority of women. To this end, feminists have waged a largely victorious “war against the housewife,” employing any means necessary to denigrate her character, intelligence, and social status.

* While feminism claims to have liberated women from antiquated sexual ideologies that formerly subordinated them to patriarchy, it has in the process instituted a new sexual ideology that subordinates them to feminism itself, reconfiguring gender relations in order to socially vindicate feminist identities and discredit others. Women could never have been drawn into the feminist fold were they not first deracinated of their femininity, which is what feminism pursued. By cultivating a dissatisfaction it could then promise to relieve, feminism turned itself into a self-fulfilling prophesy, concealing all the manipulations by which it finally earned the grudging assent of women.

* what purports to be autonomous self-determination is in fact one historically constructed understanding of human agency among others. The “inner base area” of the buffered identity isn’t something that was lying there all along, albeit concealed underneath various collectivizing illusions, but the product of specific social forces which have conditioned the human organism into its present self-reflexivity. The buffered identity is an imposition for whose sake our “default” human dispositions must be tamed and disciplined. This affect show we see feminism. The subtraction account casts feminism as a revolt against the historical repression of female agency. But the mutation counter-narrative locates feminism as among the forces that created female agency (as understood by feminism). For feminism is merely another extension of modern liberalism’s disciplinary agenda. It was feminism that molded women into the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, repressing the “lax and disorganized folkways” of traditional femininity, integrating them into the extended chains of social interdependence presupposed by the buffered distance and symbolized by the careerwoman. Feminism claims to upholds respect for women’s personhood. But as John Gray notes, personhood is not the essence of humanity, but merely one of its masks. Persons “are only humans who have donned the mask that has been handed down in Europe over the past few generations, and taken it for their face.”

* gender feminists’ motivation is powerfully enhanced by the “faith that they are privy to revolutionary insights into the nature of knowledge and society.” This “inspires them with a missionary fervor unmatched by any other group in the contemporary academy.”110“An exhilarating feeling of momentousness,” she notes, “routinely surfaces at gender feminist gatherings,” as feminist theorists invoke Copernicus and Darwin to symbolize the importance of their own discoveries, basking in the “exhilaration of feeling themselves in the vanguard of a new consciousness.” Feminists are seeking to express, not merely a set of doctrines one might or might not accept, but, more fundamentally, a consciousness one might or might not attain. They understand themselves, not only as liberated from traditional expectations and stereotypes, but furthermore as special participants in a privileged epistemic and spiritual dispensation that affords them a special lucidity unavailable to women who stubbornly resist feminism.

* Indian practices “related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions.” Unlike their American counterparts, Indian children did not assign any special status to harm-tracking morality or distinguish it from mutable social convention. For them, “the social order is a moral order.” These children “were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.” Instead, they showed that “almost any practice could be loaded up with moral force.”

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CNN: Doug Emhoff acknowledges affair during first marriage after tabloid report

Posted on August 3, 2024 by Luke Ford

Even though Democratic elites have known since at least 2020 about this affair, they still chose to put Doug Emhoff out there talking up abortion.

If he’d lived as a private citizen rather than a political activist, his affair would receive less scrutiny. Also, Kamala Harris, knowing about her husband’s affair, has chosen to put abortion at the center of her political campaign, thus raising the salience of this story.

I suspect Jews are not thrilled that Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff has been talking up “Jewish values” for years.

The people who most practice Judaism, the Orthodox, are the least likely to talk about “Jewish values” while the Jews least likely to practice Judaism are the most likely to talk to the world about “Jewish values.”

Steve Sailer says:

Why in 2014 was Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, a reasonably good-looking 50-year-old guy who was making approaching a million dollars per year as a Century City lawyer, available to marry his 50-year old coeval Kamala Harris? (Doug and Kamala were born seven days apart in October 1964.)

Not surprisingly, it turns out that it was because Doug screwed up his first marriage to the mother of his two kids by knocking up his kids’ schoolteacher whom the Emhoffs occasionally hired as a nanny.

Of course, lots of guys have done much the same. Donald Trump, for example, is on his third wife.

Why is this relevant?

It’s relevant because of the abortion issue that Kamala has chosen to run on.

Not surprisingly, while the Daily Mail emphasizes the pregnancy, the New York Times ignores it. Pregnancy raises too many interesting questions for the NYT to tolerate. Pregnancies are interesting. The NYT’s 10 million paying subscribers don’t read the NYT because it’s interesting, but because it bores them into assuming that their worldview is unquestionable.

My impression is that the median American voter finds abortion grotesque, and would like the government to derogate other people being so sloppy as to be getting abortions. On the other hand, the median voter would, now that they think about it (which they’ve been thinking about it since the Republican Supreme Court overturned Roe), like abortion to be legal just in case, God forbid, their daughter happens to get impregnated by that loser boyfriend of hers.

As movie director Todd Phillips (Hangover) suggested, isn’t it likely that Trump has paid for a lot of abortions?

On the other hand, the legalization of abortion’s impact on male behavior is a little-discussed question that might be brought to the surface in discussion of the Second Gentleman’s conundrum.

I don’t know what happened to the Second Gentleman’s unborn child, but it’s obviously an intriguing question.

Say that the reason Emhoff was available to marry Kamala was because his kids’ schoolteacher/nanny, whom he impregnated, had an abortion, so he wasn’t under social pressure as a prominent attorney to marry her.

Well, you gotta admit that’s worth talking about.

Or did Emhoff’s mistress give the baby up for adoption?

Or did he pony up the money for her to raise it as a single mother?

Or did he not put up the money?

All of these possibilities are highly relevant to the abortion policy question that Kamala is emphasizing.

From CNN:

Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff acknowledged Saturday in a statement to CNN that he had an affair during his first marriage after the alleged details of the relationship were published by a British tabloid.

“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff said in a statement provided exclusively to CNN.

The statement comes after the Daily Mail reported that Emhoff had a relationship with one of his then-young daughter’s teachers, which resulted in the end of his first marriage.

The relationship and the circumstances around it were known four years ago to Joe Biden’s vetting committee as Harris was herself going through the running mate process before being picked for the ticket, a person familiar with the conversations told CNN. The person also said that Emhoff had told Harris about the affair well before they got married.

The relationship ended years before Emhoff began dating Harris.

The Daily Mail reported that the woman became pregnant and that, according to a close friend, she “did not keep the child.”

Did she have it aborted? If so, no wonder Doug Emhoff is so pro abortion. I wonder if he’s been carrying on affairs while married to Kamala.

Mickey Kaus reports:

@MarkHalperin says the @DailyMail’s story (https://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13703933/Kamala-Harris-Doug-Emhoff-cheated-nanny-Najen-Nayler.html) has “really behind the scenes destabilized the Harris campaign …”

Emhoff boasts in press his goal is to “be there for Cole and Ella and her family. … ” Because one thing you can do for your children is have an affair with a popular teacher at their school that causes her to leave her job! Kids never talk or tease about things like that.

I’m told the Harris campaign is telling journalists, off the record, that there is no kid. But they don’t respond to questions about whether there was a pregnancy or a financial settlement with the teacher–let alone, I assume, an NDA. That’s one way to try to control the story.

Pretty amazing that Harris’ campaign can get the press to NOT report something (the pregnancy) by simply refusing to admit it or respond. At this point the pregnancy shouldn’t be hard for journalists to confirm, even if they don’t trust the Daily Mail. (And did the NYT not report Watergate because they lacked Woodward’s sources?)

Weird that @NYTimes doesn’t mention that the woman was also the Emhoffs’ nanny, something @DailyMail reports.

More important, the @NYTimes also leaves out that the woman had to leave her teaching job. Whether she was pregnant or not, this seems a key detail. Did the Times rely *only* on what Kamala aide Brian Fallon told them? There are no other sources of info?

Just noticed — there’s a supportive statement from Emhoff’s first wife, Kerstin. But there is no supportive statement from Kamala. Hmm.

Jennifer Van Laar tweets:

For whoever needs to hear this: Neither the Biden camp or the Trump camp “leaked” squat about Doug Emhoff’s affair where he knocked up the nanny/teacher. I’m one of a number of journos who’ve known about it since 2020, but we all knew just certain portions. Once Kamala became the de facto nominee I got more info from sources completely removed from either camp, as did a few others I’ve spoken to over the last week. I can only assume that Daily Mail did too, and decided to do the work – and it paid off.

Her main job was as a teacher at the private school [Willows in Culver City] Emhoff’s kids attended, and she moonlighted with the Emhoff family. But agree, it’s harassment. She lost her job at the school after the affair was discovered by Emhoff’s then-wife. So it’s terrible that the woman paid the price for everything, and not Emhoff.

NBC News reported May 8, 2024:

ATLANTA — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff is pushing for more men to become involved in advocating for abortion rights, telling NBC News in an exclusive interview that he sees a role for men in the ongoing battle over access.

Emhoff, who partnered with a group called Men4Choice to convene a panel in Atlanta, said men must see the fight over abortion access as both a women’s issue and a family issue that affects the fundamental freedoms of all Americans. Ahead of the November election, he plans to mobilize men across the country around the issue and to stress the importance of men being allies to women regarding reproductive health care.

“This is an issue of fairness to women. Women are dying,” Emhoff said. “It’s affecting man’s ability to plan their lives. And it’s also an issue of what’s next, what other freedoms are at risk. And these freedoms are affecting all Americans, not just women.”

… The second gentleman has also been discussing the topic with men in his personal life.

“I’m talking about this with my other dad friends,” he said. “I’m talking about it with my son. And it’s not just because I also have a daughter. I have a son and we talk about it, about how this is going to impact him and how he’s going to start a family or not.”

Opposing abortion had never been a big part of Christianity nor conservatism until the 1970s when it became a good organizing principle for American Republicans.

Christopher Caldwell writes Aug. 2, 2024:

The worldview Buchanan was espousing in 1992 was the one he had carried through the Nixon administration: the country was a republic, a republic required citizens of a certain character, and that character was eroded by paternalism of all kinds. But two historic changes had modified his outlook. First, the paternalism that had been introduced after 1964 to solve the American race problem had not just fallen short of expectations; it had given government a new power to censor. Progressive opinions were coming to have the force of law.

Second, while he continued to revere Ronald Reagan as a leader, Buchanan had reconsidered his free-market policies, concluding that they had gone too far. Buchanan’s 1992 speech in Houston is today remembered for its “culture war” notes—its allegation that on matters of race, sex, and religion the American government had become the adversary of the American people. True enough, but the real innovation in the speech was its dramatis personae: factory workers terrified of being laid off, a single mother who says, “I’ve lost my job; I don’t have any money, and they’re going to take away my little girl.” These were people certain Republicans brought up only to make fun of. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, would chuckle on air about the homeless with Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s rollicking “Ain’t Got No Home” running as a soundtrack.

“My friends, these people are our people,” Buchanan told the crowd. “They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. . . . They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.”

There is your harbinger of the present time. The Republicans in the Astrodome may have been too swaddled in ideology to understand what they were hearing—Buchanan only took a quarter of the Republican vote that primary season. But the people who did understand it received the message like an electroshock. The Republican party would live on as a racket for its networkers. But it would not be taken seriously by its base again until it figured out what Buchanan was talking about. That process would take twenty-four years…

If we look at the popular discontents out of which Reaganism arose in the late 1970s, this makes a good deal of sense. There was a worry that civil rights agitation, strengthened by the full might of the federal government, was becoming a means to boss people around and grind the faces of the white poor. A worry was all it was—it was not yet a grievance. But for Francis the writing was on the wall. He believed that the damage had already been done, and that the yeomanry’s will to self-rule had been broken…

The first Bush era, by contrast, was a silence in which Americans could mull over what the country had actually become: a soft despotism (to use Tocqueville’s phrase), operating under a system that journalists baptized “political correctness” during the 1989–90 school year. This is the America of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing and the invention of sexual harassment. Momentum was building towards the Republican landslide of 1994, starting with the election of Republicans Christine Todd Whitman as governor of New Jersey and Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York City in 1993. It is the same America that saw the publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve in 1994, O. J. Simpson’s murder of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994, and his acquittal in 1995. Without falsifying Ganz’s diagnosis of economic Reaganism, these episodes brought a hardening in the country’s cultural Reaganism. The mood Ganz picks up in 1991 lasted until mid-decade, seemingly burning itself out in a matter of weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. That was when two long-awaited and largely despaired-of transitions finally seemed to “take.” First, the draconian War on Drugs, a project of mass incarceration launched a decade before by Reagan and pursued with unflagging zeal by Bush and Clinton, at last brought an astonishing drop in crime. Second, primed by the post–Cold War “peace dividend,” the bet Clinton had placed on Silicon Valley’s innovation brought a new, post-industrial, pollution-free, and generalized prosperity—generalized, at least, among the opinion-forming classes.

The problems were solved and the era had ended. By the time similar problems rolled around again, a generation later, America would be a different country, operating under different rules, and with a different ruling class…

The cultural part of Reaganism was more important than the economic—and this is because it addressed, however tentatively, a considerably larger failure, a regime crisis, in fact, which was already of long standing in the early 1990s and which continues today. This is government’s glaring failure in the years since Lyndon Johnson’s reforms of 1964 and 1965—especially in civil rights and immigration law—to recover anything like the freedom, self-rule, and fellow-feeling of the America they overthrew…

But today’s sometimes majoritarian populism is not yesterday’s fringe discontent. The most arresting thing about the thinkers and demagogues Ganz so vividly brings back to life is not their extremism but their Reaganesque triumphalism, their cockiness. A much-consulted book of the time was the journalist Peter Brown’s Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond. Sam Francis, for all his disappointment with Republicans, didn’t think of himself as fringe or schismatic. He claimed to speak on behalf of “a profound social movement that reflects the dynamics of American society and promises to dominate not only politically, but also perhaps socially and culturally.” One seldom hears a Trumpian talk this way. Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Ross Perot were tribunes of an angry people that nonetheless still had reason to think of itself as the best people. Unless it put up an energetic resistance to the drift of events, they warned, it would end up a radically diminished people. In this, at least, they proved right.

A key foundation of the trad worldview is that there is a social order (as opposed to the liberal view that you create meaning and morality within yourself). The right-winger likely has an ethos of do your duty while the liberal likely has an ethos of follow your bliss.

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:

* Amy Wax observes that rationalistic liberals are unmoved and unimpressed by social conservatives’ “[v]ague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of the social order, which they dismiss as “an inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires.” And this is because they understand these vague premonitions as symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility, which cannot be allowed interfere with modern “fulfillment.” Hence Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, where he argued that homosexuality in and of itself “involves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one’s value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest.” This is how moral opposition to homosexuality must be conceived within a strategic perspective—as mere Hobbesian “annoyance” rather than some disequilibrium in the order of things. Thus understood, the desire to regulate others’ unobtrusive personal conduct out of concern for the “moral fiber of society” is a disingenuous gambit to arrogate state power in the service of merely personal preferences.

Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that the original bohemians regarded their way of life as “appropriate for only a select few, those superior souls capable of throwing off the shackles of bourgeois convention.” Far from attempting to proselytize the world to their free-spiritedness, they viewed themselves as exceptional people whose singular spiritual independence was beyond the reach of the many. But with the democratization of bohemia, what was once a subculture and curiosity has become the dominant culture and orthodoxy. The immoralism that was previously a hobby of academicians and bohemians has mutated into a corrosive social nihilism that attacks the very foundations of the American spirit.

* The “kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and normal,” complains Himmelfarb, is “now seen as pathological, concealing behind the façade of respectability the new ‘original sin’ of child abuse.” In the same spirit of systematic inversion, “smoking has been elevated to the rank of vice and sin, while sexual promiscuity is tolerated as a matter of individual right and choice.” At the same time, rape has ironically been “defined up” to include “date rape”—sexual activity “which participants themselves at the time might not have perceived as rape.” The anointed reject the common sense of the benighted because its very commonness is an affront to their identity, which requires them to systematically invert every inherited norm and understanding. Their identity presupposes a world that resists their prescriptions, a world too benighted to recognize their superior wisdom and morality—and thus all the more in need of these. Whether the issue is the rights of criminals or the merits of avant-garde art, there is, writes Sowell, always a “pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all costs.”

* As a dissident culture, conservatism is by definition in a position of weakness. The elites of the dissident culture “cannot begin to match, in numbers or influence, those who occupy the commanding heights of the dominant culture, such as professors, journalists, television and movie producers, and various cultural entrepreneurs.”38Even religion has fallen under the dominant culture’s sway. One might have expected it to be at the forefront of the resistance. But “priding themselves on being cosmopolitan and sophisticated, undogmatic and uncensorious,” the mainline churches have offered “little or no resistance” to the “prevailing culture.”

* Conservatives, bewails Himmelfarb, were at one time “convinced that ‘the people,’ as distinct from the ‘elites,’ were still ‘sound,’ still devoted to traditional values, and that only superficially and intermittently were they (or more often their children) seduced by the blandishments of the counterculture.” But this “confidence has eroded, as surely as the values themselves have.” Conservative claimants of cultural oppression understand themselves as representing, not the numerical majority, but what the numerical majority would be but for the mass indoctrination of ultra-liberalism., but for the “blandishments of the counterculture.”

* The dominant culture in fact “exhibits a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices.” The “elite culture,” which includes the media and academia, exists at one end of it. But that elite is “only a small if a most visible and influential part of this culture,” most of which consists “of people who are generally passive and acquiescent.” These people“ lead lives that, in most respects, most of the time, conform to traditional ideals of morality and propriety.” However, they do so “with no firm confidence in the principles underlying their behavior” and are for this reason “vulnerable to weaknesses and stresses in their own lives, and undermined by the example of their less conventional peers or those whom they might think of as their superiors.”

* What culture wars skeptics uphold as all-American centrism is in fact the demoralization of one belligerent by another, the oppression of conservatives by liberals.

* “If Europeans do not share our ‘obsession,’ as they say, with morality, dismissing it disparagingly as ‘moralistic,’ it is perhaps because their ethos still has lingering traces of their monarchic and aristocratic heritage—those vestiges of class, birth, and privilege that are congenial to a ‘loose’ system of morality.” By contrast, “Americans, having been spared that legacy and having relied from the beginning upon character as a test of merit and self-discipline as the precondition of self-government, still pay homage to ‘republican virtue.’”

* Himmelfarb observes that a level of delinquency which a white suburban teenager can indulge with relative impunity may be “literally fatal to a black inner city teenager.”67And Goldberg charges that, not content to just personally indulge in Dionysian excess, “today’s secular royalty” of Hollywood liberals “feel compelled to export values only the very rich and very admired can afford.” Madonna could urge her followers to cast off their bourgeois sexual hang-ups. But whereas she could simply settle down with a husband and kids once she outgrew her hedonism, the “lower-middle-class girls from Jersey City who took her advice” were not so lucky.

* Himmelfarb’s contraposition of an egalitarian conservatism humbly embodying austere republican virtue against a liberalism of the socially privileged drawn to aristocratic vice is advanced as a thesis about the social determinants of poverty.

* Gertrude Himmelfarb charges that the “New Victorians” of the politically correct Left have abandoned the traditional sexual morality of the old Victorians while promoting “a new moral code that is more intrusive and repressive than the old because it is based not on familiar, accepted principles but on new and recondite ones, as if designed for another culture or tribe.” …Christopher Lasch complains that upper middle-class liberals have, in the name of a “hygienic conception of life” mounted “a crusade to sanitize American society: to create a ‘smoke-free environment,’ to censor everything from pornography to ‘hate speech,’ and at the same time, incongruously, to extend the range of personal choice in matters where most people feel the need of solid moral guidelines.”

* Himmelfarb objects that whereas the old Victorians espoused a set of clear, consistent, and commonsensical moral prohibitions, the “New Victorians” of the Left have adopted a convoluted and often contradictory moral code, a “curious combination of promiscuity and prudery.” The New Victorians do not denounce drunkenness but only “those who take ‘advantage’ of their partners’ drunkenness.” They also trivialize rape by “associating it with ‘date rape,’ defined so loosely as to include consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman.”15These currents, argues Himmelfarb, have engendered a new and unprecedented repressiveness. Being straightforward and commonsensical, the old code was “deeply embedded in tradition and convention” and so “largely internalized.”16By contrast, the morality of the New Victorians is “novel and contrived, officially legislated and coercively enforced.”17Though the old Victorians have an undeserved reputation as meddlesome moralists and officious busybodies, they would in reality “have been as distressed by the overtness and formality of college regulations governing sexual conduct (with explicit consent required at every stage of the sexual relation) as by the kind of conduct—promiscuity, they would have called it—implicitly sanctioned by those regulations.”

* The buffered self is the self that is defined ontologically by the possibility of disengagement and, normatively, by the demand for disengagement, by the imperative to “take a distance” from “everything outside the mind,” as Taylor says, and thereby establish an “inner base area” through which to distinguish how things are from how they feel. And it is this civilizational imperative that drives the seemingly convoluted morality of the New Victorians. The purpose of communicative sexuality is to advance that imperative and thereby ensure the self-possession required to distinguish authentic, inwardly generated desire from externally induced “pressure.” The requirement that consent be somehow re-elicited and re-issued at every stage of asexual encounter is intended to promote the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, without which a woman’s true feelings cannot be distinguished from whatever fleeing, merely animal impulses her seducer may have succeeded in stimulating. The sense that “consensual intercourse that is belatedly regretted by the woman” can constitute rape reflects the retrospective insight that the seducer was indifferent to fostering this inner base area and thus bears responsibility for the consequences.

Many middle class kids can watch porn, enjoy promiscuous sex and listen to rap and still pull straight As before marrying and having kids, but these same vices of porn and promiscuity and rap may well unbalance those with less discipline and fewer resources. Just because you can watch Game of Thrones and enjoy it without any discernible harm does not mean others will lose their bearings from its blandishments.

Civilization is a particular hero system. To maintain civilization, you need walls against competing hero systems.

While I was enjoying promiscuity, at times I would be called up on to exercise super-human restraint such as when a woman changed her mind in the middle of intercourse and I forced myself to withdraw. This only happened to me a handful of times, and only with women with whom I was not in an exclusive long-running relationship, but it took all of my will to do this.

I’d meet a woman at a party, start dating her, and just as filled up with desire and began making a move on her, she’d tell me she was married, and I had to exercise all of my will to stop, which I always did. I would never have been in these challenging circumstances if I abided by traditional morality.

if everybody had my sex life of 1994-1995 when I slept with about 20 women, civilization would be in trouble.

JD Vance writes about the dissolution of America’s morals in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis:

Nobel – winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites. What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle – class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough — I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.

The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work — a wife – to – be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him . There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.

Different groups tend to evolve different hero systems. Upholding moral standards is harder in a multi-cultural society where you live surrounded by competing hero systems. Fights over abortion are usually a proxy war for competing hero systems. Racial conflict is often a proxy for competing hero systems. For example, East-Asian-Americans will often seek more rigorous public schools than other groups.

Thomas B. Edsall writes for the New York Times Sep. 15, 2021:

[Political scientist Alan] Abramowitz pointed out, opinions on abortion are also closely connected with racial attitudes:

“Whites who score high on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance are far more likely to support strict limits on abortion than whites who score low on these measures. This is part of a larger picture in which racial attitudes are increasingly linked with opinions on a wide range of disparate issues including social welfare issues, gun control, immigration and even climate change. The fact that opinions on all of these issues are now closely interconnected and connected with racial attitudes is a key factor in the deep polarization within the electorate that contributes to high levels of straight ticket voting and a declining proportion of swing voters.”

Some of the scholars and journalists studying the evolving role of abortion in American politics make the case that key leaders of the conservative movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s — among them Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell Sr. — were seeking to expand their base beyond those opposed to the civil rights movement. According to this argument, conservative strategists settled on a concerted effort to politicize abortion in part because it dodged the race issue and offered the opportunity to unify conservative Catholics and Evangelicals.

“The anti-abortion movement has been remarkably successful at convincing observers that the positions individuals take on the abortion issue always follow in a deductive way from their supposed moral principles. They don’t,” Katherine Stewart, the author of the 2019 book “The Power Worshipers,” wrote in an email.

In 1978, the hostile reaction to an I.R.S. proposal to impose taxes on churches running segregated private schools (“seg academies” for the children of white Southerners seeking to avoid federally mandated school integration orders) provided the opportunity to mobilize born again and evangelical parishioners through the creation of the Moral Majority. As Stewart argues, Viguerie, Weyrich and others on the right were determined to find an issue that could bring together a much larger constituency:

As Weyrich understood, building a new movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools wasn’t going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. “Stop the tax on segregation” just wasn’t going to inspire the kind of broad-based conservative counterrevolution that Weyrich envisioned.

After long and contentious debate, conservative strategists came to a consensus, Stewart writes: “They landed upon the one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age: ‘abortion.’”

In an email, Stewart expanded on her argument. Abortion opponents:

“are more likely to be committed to a patriarchal worldview in which the control of reproduction, and female sexuality in particular, is thought to be central in maintaining a gender hierarchy that (as they see it) sustains the family, which they claim is under threat from secular, modern forces.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2001 book One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of Our Cultural Revolution:

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith described the “two different schemes or systems of morality” that prevail in all civilized societies.

“In every civilized society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people: the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion.”

The liberal or loose system is prone to the “vices of levity” — “luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc.” Among the “people of fashion,” these vices are treated indulgently. The “common people,” on the other hand, committed to the strict or austere system, regard such vices, for themselves at any rate, with “the utmost abhorrence and detestation,” because they — or at least “the wiser and better sort” of them — know that these vices are almost always ruinous to them. Whereas the rich can sustain years of disorder and extravagance — indeed, regard the liberty to do so without incurring any censure or reproach as one of the privileges of their rank — the people know that a single week’s dissipation can undo a poor workman forever. This is why, Smith explained, religious sects generally arise and flourish among the common people, for these sects preach that system of morality upon which their welfare depends.

Much of the social history of modern times can be written in terms of the rise and fall, the permutations and combinations, of these two systems. Smith knew, of course, that these “systems” are just that — prescriptive or normative standards against which people are judged but which they often violate in practice. He had no illusions about the actual behavior of either class; he did not think that all “people of fashion” indulged in these “vices of levity,” nor that all the “common people,” even the “wiser and better” of them, were paragons of virtue. But he did assume that different social conditions found their reflection in different moral principles and religious institutions. Thus the upper classes were well served by a lenient established church, while the lower classes were drawn to the austere dissenting sects.

There are vices such as sexual affairs that rich people such as Doug Emhoff can engage in with relatively little damage to himself but that would end all prospects for a person in a lower class with fewer resources.

From the Kamala Harris Chapter in Peter Schweizer’s 2020 Book – Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite:

The pattern of selective enforcement of laws continued during her tenure as attorney general. Beyond the move to Sacramento and the new job, Harris also became romantically involved with Los Angeles attorney Douglas Emhoff. The two met on a blind date set up by a close friend of Harris. They were engaged in March 2014. By August, they were married. It was a private ceremony presided over by her sister, Maya. Guests were sworn to secrecy.

Emhoff has practiced corporate law most of his career and specializes in defending corporations facing charges of unfair business practices and entertainment and intellectual property law matters. He established his own boutique firm in Los Angeles, but was later tapped to become the partner – in – charge at the Los Angeles office of Venable LLP, an international law firm with offices around the country. As partner – in – charge, Emhoff was involved in all cases coming out of the office. Venable’s clients included a parade of corporations who had matters sitting on Kamala Harris’s desk. The fate of many of those cases is further evidence of the selective nature of the way she has exercised power, often for the benefit of friends, family, and those with whom they have financial ties.

Nutritional supplement companies have faced a myriad of legal actions over the years about what critics claim are exaggerated statements about the effectiveness of their products. This would seem to be a natural area for Harris to use her powers as attorney general and as a self – professed consumer advocate.

Indeed, in 2015 the attorneys general from fourteen other states, including New York, launched an effort to investigate nutrition companies on the grounds of false advertising and mislabeling. They claimed, “Many products contained ingredients that were not listed on their labels and that could pose serious health risks.” Harris, who had a history of working with these AGs on other issues, did not participate. 117

At the same time that these states were pursuing the nutritional supplement issue, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) was also going after dietary supplement producers, charging them with exaggerated claims about their products “that are unsupported by adequate scientific evidence.” 118 Their targets included General Nutrition Corporation (GNC), Herbalife, AdvoCare International, Vitamin Shoppe, Walgreens, and others.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into Herbalife in March 2014. 119 In California, Harris’s attorney general’s office had received more than seven hundred complaints about Herbalife. 120 In July 2016, the FTC won a $200 million settlement against Herbalife. 121 But Harris never even investigated the company.

Something very strange occurred in this instance when it came to Harris’s handling of the matter. The Los Angeles Times noted her conspicuous failure to participate in the action. 122

It is worth noting that those corporations in question all happened to be clients of her husband’s law firm, Venable LLP. GNC, Herbalife, AdvoCare International, Vitamin Shoppe, and others were represented by Venable. 123 Indeed, her husband’s office had only months earlier, in January, represented Walgreens in a case involving false advertising claims. Though the lawsuit was dismissed, the possibility of another class action case remained. 124

Herbalife was one of Venable’s large clients, paying the firm for thousands of hours of legal work. 125 Herbalife had been the subject of a standing court order since 1986 concerning its advertising claims and practices. 126 Critics point out that Harris declined to enforce those standing court orders. 127

As Harris was deciding on how to deal with the Herbalife matter, the company’s lobbying firm threw her a fund – raiser. On February 26, 2015, the Podesta Group, which specifically represented Herbalife, held a luncheon fund – raiser for Harris in Washington, D.C. 128

In 2015, prosecutors from Harris’s own attorney general’s office based out of San Diego sent her a long memorandum arguing that Herbalife needed to be investigated. They also requested additional resources to probe further into the company and its practices. Harris declined to investigate or provide the resources — and never offered a reason. 129
By August 2015, Venable LLP promoted Emhoff to managing director of the West Coast operations.

Posted in Abortion, California, Feminism, Kamala Harris | Comments Off on CNN: Doug Emhoff acknowledges affair during first marriage after tabloid report

The Kamala Harris Chapter In Peter Schweizer’s 2020 Book – Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite

Posted on August 2, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here you go:
President Barack Obama stood in front of an array of well – heeled donors in a private home in super – rich Atherton, California. Having just been reelected five months earlier, he was touting his White House accomplishments. After a few comments, he praised California attorney general Kamala Harris, who was also in the room, and highlighted her “dedication and brilliance.” He added: “She also happens to be by far the best – looking attorney general in the country.” 1
While the comments struck some observers as inappropriately personal and unprofessional, they revealed the close and long history that Obama and Harris shared. Harris had first supported Obama while he was running for the Senate in Illinois back in 2004. After he was elected, Obama flew out to San Francisco and held a fund – raiser for Harris. She had just been elected San Francisco district attorney and needed to retire some campaign debt. The newly minted senator from Illinois showed up at San Francisco’s famed Bimbo’s on Broadway to help. In 2007, when Obama announced his plans to run for president in Springfield, Illinois, she was again by his side. Harris and several members of her family joined the campaign. Harris, her sister Maya, and brother – in – law Tony West would labor over the next year to help Obama’s ambition become a reality. Kamala walked the snowbound precincts of Iowa, visited New Hampshire, and traveled to Nevada and Pennsylvania to campaign for him. Harris took the helm of his California campaign, serving as cochair. When Obama won, she was with him in Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate the victory. 2
Harris is widely admired in progressive circles as the “female Obama.” 3 Smooth, polished, and confident, she has worked hard to “cultivate a celebrity mystique while fiercely guarding her privacy.” 4 This rising star in the Democratic Party also has a taste for expensive Manolo Blahnik shoes and Chanel handbags. 5
Harris paints herself as a gritty lawyer who is climbing the ladder of power by her own strength and determination. She has also positioned herself as “smart on crime,” even publishing a book by that same title. 6
The reality of her rise to prominence is far more complicated — and how she has leveraged her power along the way is troubling. Harris’s elevation to national politics is closely tied to one of California’s most allegedly corrupt political machines and investigations into her tenure as a prosecutor raise disturbing questions about her use of criminal statutes in a highly selective manner, presumably to protect her friends, financial partners, and supporters.
Most disturbing, she has covered up information concerning major allegations of criminal conduct, including some involving child molestation.

Kamala Devi Harris was born to Donald Harris, her Jamaican – born father and Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, her Tamil Brahmin mother from India. Her father is a Marxist economist who taught at Stanford University; at one point, he advised the Jamaican government. Her mother was a highly regarded research scientist who worked in the field of breast cancer. 7 Her parents were divorced when Kamala was five, and her mother’s family had a defining influence on her childhood. “One of the most influential people in my life, in addition to my mother, was my grandfather T. V. Gopalan, who actually held a post in India that was like the Secretary of State position in this country,” Harris recalled. “My grandfather was one of the original Independence fighters in India, and some of my fondest memories from childhood were walking along the beach with him after he retired and lived in Besant Nagar, in what was then called Madras.” Harris draws on those Indian roots to define herself. “When we think about it, India is the oldest democracy in the world — so that is part of my background, and without question has had a great deal of influence on what I do today and who I am.” 8
Harris recounts regular visits as a child to her mother’s homeland. After she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she traveled to India and found that her grandmother had organized a party and press conference for her. Her grandfather was still a government official in Chennai. “One by one people came to pay homage. ‘It was like a scene out of The Godfather ,’ ” Kamala said. 9 Harris was close to her grandfather, who was “a joint secretary in the central government,” and “instilled in her a thirst for service.” 10
While Harris attended Howard University, a traditionally black college, and served as president of the Black Law Students Association at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, many saw her leaning more toward her mother’s culture than her father’s. According to her mother Shyamala, Kamala knows “all the Hindu mythology and traditions,” and that “Kamala will be equally at ease in a temple or a church.” Harris was born during Dusshera, a major Hindu celebration. “So I gave her the name thinking of Goddess Lakshmi.” 11 Shyamala insisted that giving her daughters names derived from the Indian pantheon was important to her children’s development. “A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women,” she says. 12 Adds her mother, “Kamala is a frequent visitor to the Shiva Vishnu temple in Livermore [California]. She performs all rituals and says all prayers at the temple. My family always wanted the children to learn the traditions, irrespective of their place of birth.” 13
* * *
Kamala Harris’s entrée into the corridors of political power largely began with a date. In 1994, she met Willie Brown, who at the time was the second – most – powerful man in California politics. As Speaker of the State Assembly, Brown was a legend in Sacramento and around the state. He represented a district in the Bay Area and was well known in San Francisco social circles. In addition to running the California Assembly, Brown ran a legal practice on the side, which meant taking fees from lobbyists and industries that may have wanted favorable treatment in Sacramento. Brown was under investigation several times, by the State Bar of California, the Fair Political Practices Commission, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 14 In 1986, for example, as California Assembly Speaker, he “received at least $124,000 in income and gifts . . . from special interests that had business before the Legislature.” 15
Despite a lifetime in politics and public service, Brown was known for his expensive Brioni suits, Borsalino hats, Ferraris, and Porsches. 16 Later he downgraded to a Jaguar. “My body would reject a Plymouth,” he said. 17 Along the way he played a version of himself in The Godfather Part III . Brown finally retired from political office in 2004. He purchased a $1.8 million condo in the St. Regis in San Francisco two years later. 18
Willie Brown was married in 1958 (and remains so today) but that did not matter: Brown was sixty at the time he began dating Kamala, who was twenty – nine. Brown was actually two years older than her father. Their affair was the talk of San Francisco in 1994. 19 Kamala’s mother defends her daughter’s decision — and offered choice comments about Brown. “Why shouldn’t she have gone out with Willie Brown? He was a player. And what could Willie Brown expect from her in the future? He has not much life left.” 20
Brown began pulling levers for Harris that both boosted her career and put money in her pocket, rewarding Kamala with appointments to state commissions that paid handsomely and did not require confirmation by the legislature. He put Kamala on the State Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later the California Medical Assistance Commission. The Medical Assistance Commission paid $99,000 a year in 2002. 21 The Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board paid around $114,000 a year. Both posts were part – time. At the time, she was working as a county employee making around $100,000. 22
Along the way, Brown also bought young Kamala a new BMW. 23
Perhaps the most important thing Brown gave Harris was access to his vast network of political supporters, donors, and sponsors. Soon she was publicly arm in arm with Brown in the most elite circles of San Francisco, including lavish parties and celebrity galas. 24
By 1995, Willie Brown was running for mayor of San Francisco and Harris was regularly by his side. On election night, Willie Brown stood before his guests at the Longshoremen’s Union Hall. He was all smiles as the election results rolled in. Harris was in front of the crowd with him, smiling, and handed him a blue baseball cap emblazoned with “Da Mayor.” Brown placed the cap on his head and then Rev. Cecil Williams, a local fixture and longtime Brown friend, handed him a piece of paper. 25
“It’s over!” he proclaimed. 26
The election wasn’t the only thing that was over that night. Many had speculated that Brown would divorce his wife and marry Harris, but that didn’t happen. Shortly after Brown’s electoral victory, he and Harris split up. There are conflicting reports as to who actually left whom. Most accounts report that Brown broke up with Harris.
After the split, Kamala Harris started dating another prominent man: television talk – show host Montel Williams. 28
The romance with Brown might have been over, but Harris had political ambitions of her own, and the two remained allies. Brown, as mayor, would prove to be enormously helpful in her rise to political power.
Willie Brown possessed the most powerful political machine in Northern California. As mayor, he leveraged that power to enrich his friends and allies. During his tenure, Brown came under FBI investigation twice for corruption involving lucrative contracts flowing from the city to his political friends. His operation was soon dubbed “Willie Brown Inc.” Even local Democrats who might agree with Brown’s political views were turned off by the cronyism and corruption that was rampant under “Da Mayor.” “I thought it was only in Third World countries that people were forced to pay bribes to get services they’re entitled to from their government,” said U.S. district judge Charles Legge about the rampant corruption under Brown. “But we find it right here in San Francisco.” 29
Three years or so after Brown’s election, San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan hired Kamala Harris to head up his office’s Career Criminal Unit. 30 Hallinan, nicknamed “K.O.” for his boxing skills, was a tough progressive who had little problem taking on the most powerful forces in San Francisco, whether it be the police or the new mayor. 31 Hallinan insisted that Harris’s connection to Willie Brown had nothing to do with the hiring. Whether it did or not, Hallinan would soon regret his decision.
Shortly after she joined Hallinan’s office, the number two slot in the prosecutor’s office opened up. Harris wanted the job, but Hallinan chose someone else. 32 Brown seemed furious at Hallinan, ostensibly for other matters. The mayor was publicly attacking Hallinan for failing to do his job. An insider had a different take. “This whole thing is about Kamala Harris,” one Brown friend told the San Francisco Chronicle . “Cross one of Willie’s friends and there will be hell to pay.” 33
The relationship between Willie Brown and Terence Hallinan had always been a complicated one. Hallinan had publicly embraced one of Brown’s rivals, Tom Ammiano. Hallinan had also been investigating Brown allies for corruption. 34
Passed over by Hallinan, Harris abruptly left the district attorney’s office and went to work at the city attorney’s office, which was run by a close Brown ally. Soon the Brown machine was cranking up to help Kamala Harris run against Hallinan. 35
By 2003, Harris threw her hat in the ring and announced her decision to challenge Hallinan for his position as San Francisco district attorney. Less known in San Francisco than her opposition, she regularly came a distant third in opinion polls, often registering in the single digits. 36 But she could count on the Willie Brown Machine, which at the time ran so much of San Francisco. Rebecca Prozan, a former Willie Brown aide, was brought on as Harris’s campaign manager to give her a boost. 37 Harris’s finance chair was Mark Buell, a major Democratic Party fund – raiser. A political consultant named Philip Muller set up an independent expenditure committee called the California Voter Project. Armed with a letter from Brown, he raised money to help boost her campaign. Muller had worked on both of Brown’s mayoral races. 38 Beyond Muller’s independent efforts, the flow of money directly into her campaign was unlike anything the district attorney’s race had ever seen. “She’s hauling in campaign cash like there’s no tomorrow,” said the San Francisco Weekly . 39
Much of the money came from the super – wealthy of San Francisco who were close to Brown. The mayor himself gave the maximum contribution — $500 — and penned a letter that Philip Muller, his close aide, took around to wealthy donors to raise cash. The letter asked the San Francisco elite to cough up five hundred dollars each to “help Kamala win.” 40
While Kamala Harris would later cast the campaign as a grassroots operation, it was a much more exclusive affair. The San Francisco elite embraced her, which meant all – white fund – raisers in Pacific Heights. Frances Bowes, heir to the fortune made from Hula – Hoops and Frisbees, hosted an event and brought friends like romance novelist Danielle Steel to write large checks. Bowes had originally met Harris through a “longtime Willie Brown crony” while Brown and Harris were still dating. The Brown endorsement of her campaign also opened doors — and wallets. “Why, Willie Brown just wrote us a letter on her behalf,” Bowes said. 41
Friends and alliances with the San Francisco elite she had formed while dating Willie Brown also came to her aid. The Getty clan, heirs to the vast J. Paul Getty fortune, were “strongly behind Harris,” and Vanessa and Billy Getty became “good friends.” 42
Harris denied that there was an effort by Brown to help her, but as the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “a large number of her contributors also have been donors to Harris’ onetime boyfriend and political sponsor, Mayor Willie Brown.” Darolyn Davis, who worked as Brown’s communications director during his days in Sacramento as the Assembly Speaker, threw a fund – raiser that netted nearly $15,000. 43
Very quickly, the upstart challenger was dramatically outraising the incumbent. Indeed, Harris raised double what Hallinan did. The money flow was so great that it led Hallinan to allege that Harris broke a law by surpassing a voluntary spending cap that she had pledged in writing to honor. In January 2003, shortly after announcing her campaign, Harris had signed a form saying that she would stick to the city’s $211,000 voluntary spending cap for the campaign. An official handbook put out by the city’s Department of Elections identified candidates that had signed the pledge. 44 The voter’s guide is designed to let voters know which candidates agreed to abide by the law.
Harris signed the pledge — and then blew right past the spending limit. By the end of November, she had raised $621,000 — almost three times more than the cap she had pledged to honor. 45 The San Francisco Ethics Commission vote to fine Harris was unanimous. Her campaign had to pay a $34,000 fine, a record in city elections.
Blowing past the financial cap was not the only ethical issue raised about her campaign. Critics questioned the donations she accepted from individuals with matters sitting before her at her office in the city attorney’s office. In particular, she was taking “campaign contributions from slumlords with cases before” her office. 47 According to Harris’s campaign donor filings, more than 10 percent of her donors were owners or operators of single – room – occupancy hotels identified as “problematic” by city officials. Donors included hotel owners cited by city officials as a “city nuisance” because of numerous arrests for “drug activity, assault, rape, robbery and burglary.” Another donor was the son of a hotel owner who verbally harassed a deputy city attorney and at one point threatened to shoot the attorney over code enforcement.
Carol Langford, a legal ethics expert who headed the American Bar Association ethics committee, saw the money flow as a major problem. “Of course, there’s a conflict there. If your office sues someone and you take money from the defendant, that’s a conflict.” She added, “Consider the tenants of these flea – bag hotels who are worried about bugs and rats — and then they see someone who is supposed to be protecting them taking money from the landlord. What are they going to think?” 48 Hallinan, who was being vastly outspent in the campaign, claimed that “many of the contributors are connected with city government.” He argued that they were not giving that money for nothing; she would have trouble dealing with “corruption in city agencies” because of the conflict of interest. 49
The ethical problems with Harris’s campaign went beyond the financial questions. Shortly after the election, complaints emerged from city cleaning crews who said they were forced during the campaign to attend political events for mayoral candidate Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris. 50 Willie Brown had a history of deploying a “patronage army” — a cadre of city employees who performed political work because they owed him their jobs — to help favored candidates win elections. 51
In this particular case, workers assigned to street cleaning crews complained that they were asked to do political work including during Kamala Harris’s run for district attorney. Mohammed Nuru, a Brown protégé hired in 2000, was the deputy director of operations in the City’s Department of Public Works. He ran among other things a project called San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (popularly known as SLUG). The organization was supposedly hired by the city to provide cleanup and gardening work around the Bay Area. But they also served another purpose: as a resource to be deployed as part of the Willie Brown machine. In the 2003 election, they were deployed to help, among others, Kamala Harris in her bid for district attorney. 52
According to internal records, SLUG employees were told by their bosses to “attend campaign events for” Kamala Harris. 53 Campaign manager Rebecca Prozan admitted that she had conversations with the head of SLUG, Nuru, throughout the campaign, although she denies asking him to bring workers to the rallies. The results were undeniable. In one instance, Prozan admitted that the Harris campaign had mailed out 9,000 flyers for a public event, but only 50 – 75 people actually showed up. An investigator said, “Prozan concluded that all or most of the attendees were in fact SLUG workers.” Reportedly, Ron Vinson, a former Willie Brown deputy press secretary, led the workers into events. 54
In the November 2003 elections, Harris came in second behind Hallinan in a three – person race. Because neither candidate received a majority of the vote, there was a runoff. 55 Winning the upset runoff victory, in early January 2004, Kamala Harris was sworn in as San Francisco district attorney. She decided to take the oath on a copy of the Bill of Rights rather than the Bible. There were two benedictions — one from a Hindu priest in Sanskrit, the other from an African American minister. The national anthem was played — as well as the National Black Anthem. After the swearing in, there was sitar music, and soul and Indian food were provided. 56
One week after she was sworn in as district attorney, the city opened an investigation into the allegations that city workers were pressured to campaign for Harris and newly elected Mayor Gavin Newsom. But no charges were ever brought. 57
As San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris enjoyed enormous discretion in the handling of legal cases. She would often determine which cases to prosecute and which not to. This was particularly true in highly public and politically sensitive cases. Over the course of her tenure, a consistent pattern emerged of favoring individuals and institutions that were either her political supporters, or those closely aligned with Willie Brown, or both. Some of these cases involved all – too – common instances of big – city cronyism and corruption involving city contracts, but other cases would involve disturbing crimes that were covered up.
* * *
Perhaps the deepest and most troubling mystery of Kamala Harris’s tenure as a prosecutor centers on the disturbing issue of sexual abuse of children by priests. Harris often recounts her background as a sex crimes prosecutor earlier in her career to attack others for their legal failings in this area. In July 2019, for example, she rightly criticized the lax penalties that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein faced in his plea agreement with prosecutors. Harris attacked the prosecutor in the case, Alex Acosta, who was now labor secretary in the Trump administration, for “protecting predators.” Harris even went after the law firm that represented Epstein in those criminal proceedings, arguing that their representation of him “calls into question the integrity of the entire legal system.” Critics noted that she gladly took campaign donations from the same firm. 58
But Harris’s handling of the widespread priest abuse scandal in San Francisco, and later in the entire state of California, raises far more questions. During her decade – and – a – half tenure as a chief prosecutor, Harris would fail to prosecute a single case of priest abuse and her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred despite the protests of victims groups.
Harris’s predecessor as San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, was aware of and had prosecuted numerous Catholic priests on sexual misconduct involving children. And he had been gathering case files for even more. 59 In the spring of 2002, Pope John Paul II convened a meeting in Rome to discuss how to deal with the spreading news of abuse. 60 By 2003, with a rising national tide of complaints, the scandals would soon reach cities and towns across America. The Boston Globe produced a Pulitzer Prize – winning series on priest abuse and efforts to cover it up. The scandal had now most definitely engulfed San Francisco. Hallinan’s office had launched an investigation and quickly discovered that the San Francisco Archdiocese had extensive internal records concerning complaints going back some seventy – five years. In spring of 2002, Hallinan demanded the church turn them over to his office. A month later, the archdiocese reluctantly complied. 61
The secret documents were explosive and reportedly contained the names of about forty current and former priests in the San Francisco area who had been identified in sexual abuse complaints. Hallinan used the information from the files to begin pursuing legal cases against them. In nearby San Mateo and Marin County, prosecutors obtained the same church records and those in Marin charged Father Gregory Ingels in 2003. 62 But by June 2003, Hallinan and other prosecutors had hit a roadblock: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s law extending the statute of limitations for priest abuse cases was unconstitutional. 63
Nevertheless, Hallinan was determined to pursue the cases. Discussions began among California district attorneys about how diocese abuse documents might be released to the public. 64 Victim advocates were in favor of releasing them, arguing that redacting the names of victims and other sensitive information could protect their privacy. 65 Hallinan’s aggressive pursuit of these issues was of major concern to the Catholic Church and related institutions, which were facing mounting legal bills and settlements dealing with cases going back decades. Several priests were dismissed due to the anticipated release of the documents. 66
The records that Hallinan had in his possession touched on well – connected institutions at the heart of California’s power structure. St. Ignatius College Preparatory School, in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, counted California governor Jerry Brown and the powerful Getty family as alumni. 67 The school faced enormous vulnerabilities because of abuse problems there. Based on documents later released by the Jesuits who ran St. Ignatius, in the nearly sixty – year span from 1923 to 1982, in forty – three of those years the school employed at least one priest on the faculty who was later accused of abuse. 68
Hallinan’s investigation threatened to bring dozens of additional cases to light.
The Catholic Archdiocese in San Francisco had reason to be extremely nervous.
According to San Francisco election financial disclosures, high – dollar donations to Harris’s campaign began to roll in from those connected to the Catholic Church institutional hierarchy. Harris had no particular ties to the Catholic Church or Catholic organizations, but the money still came in large, unprecedented sums. Lawyer Joseph Russoniello represented the church on a wide variety of issues, including the handling of the church abuse scandal. 69 He served on the Catholic Church’s National Review Board (NRB) of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The purpose of the NRB was to review Catholic Church abuse cases. 70 Russoniello was also a partner in the San Francisco law firm Cooley Godward. Russoniello donated the maximum amount by law to her campaign, $1,250, and his law firm added another $2,250. He also sat on Harris’s advisory council when she was San Francisco district attorney. Another law firm, Bingham McCutcheon, which handled legal matters for the archdiocese concerning Catholic Charities, donated $2,825, the maximum allowed. Curiously, Bingham McCutcheon had only donated to two other candidates running for office in San Francisco before, for a total of $650. As with Russoniello, their support was unusual. 71
Another law firm, Arguedas, Cassman & Headley, was defending a San Francisco priest against abuse claims at the time. They donated $4,550 to Harris. The lawyer in the case, Cristina Arguedas, also served on Kamala Harris’s advisory council. 72
Beyond these law firms, board members of San Francisco Catholic archdiocese – related organizations and their family members donated another $50,950 to Harris’s campaign. 73
Harris also had ties to those who were working to prevent the Catholic Church documents from coming to light. Harris counts among her mentors Louise Renne, who as a city attorney for San Francisco recruited Harris to come work with her as a city attorney after her falling – out with Hallinan. 74 Louise Renne’s husband, Paul, was an attorney at the law firm Cooley Godward, where Russoniello worked. 75 Russoniello negotiated the agreement to bury the abuse records from public view. 76
Hallinan’s loss to Harris changed more than the nameplate down at the San Francisco district attorney’s office. With the changing of the guard, the fate of the investigation into Catholic priest abuse would dramatically change — and not for the better.
Harris, who had been a sexual crimes prosecutor early in her career, moved in the opposite direction of Hallinan and worked to cover – up the records. Hallinan’s office had used the archdiocese files to guide its investigations and talked publicly about releasing the documents after removing victims’ names and identifiers. Harris, on the other hand, abruptly decided to bury the records. For some reason, she did not want the documents released in any form. 77 Harris’s office claimed that the cover – up was about protecting the victims of abuse. “District Attorney Harris focuses her efforts on putting child molesters in prison,” her office claimed. “We’re not interested in selling out our victims to look good in the paper.” 78
This was a bold claim coming from Harris. During the 2003 campaign, a woman who was allegedly tortured by a boyfriend with a hot iron “blasted” Harris for citing her story during a campaign debate. “I am appalled by Kamala Harris referring to my case,” she said. “Harris is supposedly for victims, but she never consulted me before using my case.” In short, she had publicly talked about a case the victim did not want mentioned. 79
When it came to the priest abuse scandal, the opposite was true. Victims’ groups wanted the documents released and Harris was stopping it. They were outraged by her actions. Far from protecting victims, they argued, the cover – up was actually protecting the abusers by keeping their alleged crimes secret.
“They’re full of shit,” said Joey Piscitelli, the northwest regional director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), the largest and most active victims’ group. “You can quote me on that. They’re not protecting the victims.” 80
Rick Simons, an attorney who represented multiple victims of clergy abuse, also attacked Harris’s actions. Hiding the records “shows a pattern and practice and policy of ignoring the rights of children by one of the largest institutions of the city and county of San Francisco, and in the Bay Area.” 81
Kam Kuwata, a consultant to Los Angeles district attorney Rocky Delgadillo, said there was “no reason why transparency and protecting the victim cannot work hand in hand.” 82
With the outcry of victims groups, Harris’s office then attempted to shift blame, claiming that the idea of burying the evidence had been first suggested by her predecessor, Hallinan. 83 But he responded angrily to her claims. “I told Jack Hammel [the archdiocese’s legal counsel] in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t go along with anything like that.” He went on to point out that the documents contained information about a “potential target of a criminal investigation” and asserted he “wouldn’t do a deal like that for [the archdiocese] any more than I would if it were an Elks Club with a bunch of pedophiles. Those are the kinds of deals that have allowed the church sex scandal to go on as long as it has.” 84
Harris’s actions were strange because they ran contrary to her public image as a fighter for victims — particularly children. Her decision regarding the diocese abuse records set off a chain reaction among those trying to bring to light the widespread abuse that was taking place. James Jenkins, a psychologist who was the founding chairman of the archdiocese’s Independent Review Board, which was offering oversight on how to handle abuse claims, abruptly resigned from the board. He accused the church of “deception, manipulation and control” for blocking the release of the board’s findings. Jenkins argued that Harris’s deal with the archdiocese not only denied the rights of known victims, it also prevented other possible cases from coming forward. If the names of the priests who had faced credible charges were released, he said, it “would encourage other victims to come forward with their stories. . . . Usually, people who do these things have multiple offenses, usually with multiple victims. The rule of thumb is there are seven more victims for every one who comes forward.” 85
Transparency tends to embolden victims. Statistical evidence from the archdiocese confirms the view that releasing the names of accused priests led to an increase in the number of victims bringing charges. A good example of this is in Los Angeles, where District Attorney Steve Cooley ignored the church’s cry to hide the report and did the opposite of Kamala Harris: he released the records. According According to SNAP, this led to more than 211 self – reported or litigation – revealed abusers being named in the Los Angeles Archdiocese. 86 In San Francisco, there were only thirty – six, according to a lawsuit filed in 2012. 87
So, what has happened to these abuse records? It is unclear. In April 2010, a journalist with the San Francisco Weekly asked for the records through California’s Public Records Act. Harris’s office denied the request, offering conflicting explanations as to why they could not provide them. 88 In 2019, I requested those records through a California attorney. The San Francisco district attorney’s office responded that they no longer had them in their possession. Were they destroyed? Were they moved somewhere else? It remains a disturbing mystery.
Beyond the handling of these abuse records, Harris also had an abysmal record in prosecuting priest cases.
She somehow served as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and then as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, and never brought a single documented case forward against an abusive priest. 89 It is an astonishing display of inaction, given the number of cases brought in other parts of the country. To put this lack of action in perspective, at least fifty other cities charged priests in sexual abuse cases during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney. San Francisco is conspicuous by its absence. 90
The blind eye to priest sexual abuse was just part of a pattern of favoritism that has permeated Harris’s career as a prosecutor. Though not as dramatic as the sexual crimes, there were numerous instances where she was apparently prepared to look the other way to protect politically connected insiders.
Her actions represent the ultimate form of leveraging power in the criminal justice realm — deciding not to pursue criminal charges.
* * *
It was the sort of thing that vice cops are supposed to do. At San Francisco’s adult entertainment clubs, dancers were taking customers behind closed doors and having sex for money. After repeated complaints that strip clubs in San Francisco were often really serving as prostitution clubs, the San Francisco Police Department decided to take action. They sent out letters to a couple dozen strip clubs and warned them that the police would be looking into their activities. They would be checking their business licenses and making sure that their permits were up to date. The police action caught the attention of newly installed district attorney Kamala Harris, and her staff sent the message to hold off on the enforcement. Meanwhile, in response to continued complaints, the police conducted a pair of sting operations. Three undercover officers went into each of the two clubs and were quickly solicited by female employees for paid sex. At both the Market Street Theater and the New Century Theater, it happened “within minutes.” When the operations were done, nine women were arrested, as was the general manager of the New Century. The cops claimed that they were “slam dunk cases.” 91
But Kamala Harris dropped the cases.
“It just leaves me in amazement,” said San Francisco Police Department vice captain Tim Hettrich. It was “almost legalizing prostitution.” 92
Publicly, Harris claimed that the problem was that the police should be focused on arresting “street – level pimps and johns.” In a statement, Harris claimed that there had been “no arrests” of either. The San Francisco Police Department was incredulous. “That’s an outright lie,” said police investigator Joe Dutto. There were fifty to seventy johns arrested every month. 93
Harris then argued that the problem was that the doors for the private booths at the clubs were not legal and that the Department of Building Inspection should deal with them. Ken Harrington, a top building inspector, fired off a snarky memo requesting the very precise parameters of the “job” they were to do to satisfy the DA. Apparently flabbergasted that his office was responsible (not the cops), he stated, “The next thing, she’ll be blaming the gunshot homicide rate on us for not enforcing the city’s lead abatement ordinance.” 94
Harris’s strange objections to prosecuting prostitution cases connected to these raids have a possible explanation. The owner of both the Market Street and New Century theaters was a company called Déjà Vu. An owner of Déjà Vu, Sam Conti, had a long history with Willie Brown. Conti had first hired Brown as his defense attorney back in 1977. They remained friends. At Conti’s 2009 funeral, Brown delivered a videotaped eulogy. 95
Harris’s handling of this simple vice matter would set up questions about her prosecutorial conduct as it related to powerful political allies and friends. While she was prepared to throw the book at those with no connections to her, those with links to her or her powerful allies would often get charges dropped. It was selective enforcement of the law, hardly what one could call “blind justice.”
Kamala Harris entered the San Francisco attorney general’s office facing a whole host of issues beyond priest sexual abuse and strip clubs; among them was the rampant corruption that had become so common under her ex – boyfriend and political sponsor, Willie Brown. During the bitter campaign, Terence Hallinan had publicly stated that Harris would be unwilling to bring corruption charges against allies and friends of Willie Brown because they were still too close. 96 Her record as a prosecutor would prove him correct.
Willie Brown appointed Hector Chinchilla, a real estate lawyer, as head of the San Francisco Planning Commission shortly after he became mayor. The planning commission has enormous power in San Francisco in determining which projects proceed and which do not. Chinchilla, sensing an opportunity, hired himself out as a consultant to developers who were seeking city planning permits from his commission. Over the course of the next several years, he took in $181,000 from developers. 97 The corruption case seemed clear. Developers told city officials that they had been told that if they hired Chinchilla he would “run interference” regarding opposition to their development. Reportedly, “Chinchilla performed anything needed on the project.”

In 2002, then – prosecutor Terence Hallinan had charged Chinchilla with seven misdemeanor ethics laws violations. “We do regard it as a major corruption case and indicative of what is going on in San Francisco,” he said at the time. “It is very disturbing that that kind of atmosphere is pervading in San Francisco.” 99
Given how close Chinchilla was to Willie Brown, the case “roiled City Hall.” Barely eight months in office, after a judge dismissed some charges, Harris dropped all remaining charges against Chinchilla. 100
It would not be the only case of Harris dropping the criminal charges of a Willie Brown ally. Even in instances where fraud directly threatened public safety, Harris struck legal deals with the friends and allies of Willie Brown. Consider the case of Ricardo Ramirez. Ramirez ran a cement and concrete company called Pacific Cement. As of 2003, a full one – third of the public works projects in San Francisco used Pacific. 101
Ramirez was a colorful but ruthless player in the construction business. He liked to wear $500 cowboy boots and roamed around the city in a $100,000 Mercedes – Benz. He threw lavish parties with Mariachi bands and tossed around a lot of campaign cash. Having given almost $100,000 to politicians over the previous eight years made him a “well – connected political player” in San Francisco. Those contributions often went to the Willie Brown machine and were not always legal. In 1997, state officials found that Ramirez had illegally contributed $2,000 to Brown’s 1995 mayoral campaign. 102 His ties to Brown went beyond financial contributions. Ramirez was reportedly friends with Brown, but he also hired connected officials like Jim Gonzalez, who worked as a lobbyist for Ramirez. Longtime Willie Brown buddy Charlie Walker was also a close friend.
Ramirez might have gone down in the annals of San Francisco political history only as a contractor greasing palms to get city contracts, but he also cut dangerous corners threatening San Francisco public safety. Ramirez was using inferior and cheaper recycled concrete on major projects like the Golden Gate Bridge, parking garages, and light – rail projects. These were massive projects where structural integrity was key: the half – mile stretch of the Bay Bridge’s western approach; the parking garage at Golden Gate Park; a wastewater treatment plant in nearby Burlingame; and the Municipal Railway’s Third Street light – rail project. The projects required solid concrete, but Ramirez was actually using inferior recycled concrete, which contains recycled debris rather than hard rock. Prone to water penetration, recycled concrete is more likely to crack and to wear quickly. Recycled concrete is acceptable for decorative work, but for major load – bearing projects like roads or bridges, it is considered unsafe. 103
Ramirez’s company was able to keep up the scam for a while, but it eventually caught up with him. Public works agency officials went public with the fact that Ramirez’s company had defrauded them. Strangely, Ramirez never faced charges for delivering substandard concrete. Instead, Harris’s office settled for a plea deal involving a single environmental count, illegally storing waste oil at one of his production facilities. To avoid jail time, he agreed to a year in home detention and payment of $427,000 in fines and restitution. 104
City officials were mystified. Tony Anziano, an official with the state agency Caltrans who was in charge of the Bay Bridge approach project, said the agency had been defrauded by Ramirez and his company. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Anziano “said that Caltrans had always cooperated with prosecutors and that he couldn’t explain why they hadn’t pursued charges.” 105
Harris and her office refused to offer an explanation as to why they were going so light on Willie Brown’s friend and donor. “Harris’ office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case,” noted the Chronicle . 106
* * *
Kamala Harris’s signature program as San Francisco district attorney was called Back on Track — a program designed to give first – time drug offenders an opportunity to avoid a criminal record. If they participated in and successfully passed through the program, their drug record was wiped clean. 107
Harris would tout the program as enormously successful. “Back on Track is an innovative initiative that has achieved remarkable results,” she said in 2009 as she prepared her run for California attorney general. “It has dramatically reduced recidivism — the re – offense rate — among its targeted population (nonviolent, first – time, low – level drug offenders).” She boasted that fewer than 10 percent of Back on Track graduates in San Francisco had reoffended, but those numbers were highly deceptive in that they only reflected those who graduated. During the first four years of her program, for example, they kicked out almost half of those chosen for the program. The real recidivism rate was likely much higher. 108
The program was also fraught with other problems that Harris was hoping the public would ignore. Those included were not just nonviolent, first – time offenders who had committed a single drug offense. Some were illegal immigrants and violent criminals such as Alexander Izaguirre. Izaguirre had gone through the program even though he had two arrests (instead of just one) within eight months. One for selling cocaine, the other for a purse snatching. Given those facts, it is unclear how Izaguirre even got enrolled. More, Izaguirre was one of at least seven illegal immigrants who were signed up. The problem was that the job – training program that Harris had enrolled him in was training him for jobs that he could not legally hold given his immigration status. 109
One night, while he was still in the program, Izaguirre went to San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood and committed a particularly brutal crime. Amanda Kiefer was walking down the street when Izaguirre snatched her purse and jumped into a waiting SUV. Rather than drive off, the SUV sped toward Kiefer to run her down. Kiefer jumped on the hood and saw Izaguirre and the driver laughing. The driver slammed on the brakes throwing Kiefer to the ground. The impact fractured her skull. Blood was oozing from her ear. 110
Kiefer would later ask why he was even in the program. “If they’ve committed crimes and they’re not citizens, then why are they here? Why haven’t they been deported?” 111
Harris did not offer an explanation. Instead, she simply explained that enforcing federal immigration law was not her job. 112 Never mind that her oath of office required her to enforce the laws of the state of California and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
* * *
Harris has a habit of dealing with problems by covering them up.
In 2009, Harris set her ambitions higher and announced her bid for California attorney general. She enjoyed the backing of the San Francisco establishment, Willie Brown, and won a very tight 2010 race against Republican Steve Cooley, who was the Los Angeles County district attorney at the time. In the end, Harris won by fewer than 75,000 votes, or less than 1 percent, out of more than 9.6 million votes cast in the election. 113
The pattern of selective enforcement of laws continued during her tenure as attorney general. Beyond the move to Sacramento and the new job, Harris also became romantically involved with Los Angeles attorney Douglas Emhoff. The two met on a blind date set up by a close friend of Harris. They were engaged in March 2014. By August, they were married. It was a private ceremony presided over by her sister, Maya. Guests were sworn to secrecy. 114
Emhoff has practiced corporate law most of his career and specializes in defending corporations facing charges of unfair business practices and entertainment and intellectual property law matters. 115 He established his own boutique firm in Los Angeles, but was later tapped to become the partner – in – charge at the Los Angeles office of Venable LLP, an international law firm with offices around the country. 116 As partner – in – charge, Emhoff was involved in all cases coming out of the office. Venable’s clients included a parade of corporations who had matters sitting on Kamala Harris’s desk. The fate of many of those cases is further evidence of the selective nature of the way she has exercised power, often for the benefit of friends, family, and those with whom they have financial ties.
Nutritional supplement companies have faced a myriad of legal actions over the years about what critics claim are exaggerated statements about the effectiveness of their products. This would seem to be a natural area for Harris to use her powers as attorney general and as a self – professed consumer advocate.
Indeed, in 2015 the attorneys general from fourteen other states, including New York, launched an effort to investigate nutrition companies on the grounds of false advertising and mislabeling. They claimed, “Many products contained ingredients that were not listed on their labels and that could pose serious health risks.” Harris, who had a history of working with these AGs on other issues, did not participate. 117

At the same time that these states were pursuing the nutritional supplement issue, the Obama administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) was also going after dietary supplement producers, charging them with exaggerated claims about their products “that are unsupported by adequate scientific evidence.” 118 Their targets included General Nutrition Corporation (GNC), Herbalife, AdvoCare International, Vitamin Shoppe, Walgreens, and others.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into Herbalife in March 2014. 119 In California, Harris’s attorney general’s office had received more than seven hundred complaints about Herbalife. 120 In July 2016, the FTC won a $200 million settlement against Herbalife. 121 But Harris never even investigated the company.
Something very strange occurred in this instance when it came to Harris’s handling of the matter. The Los Angeles Times noted her conspicuous failure to participate in the action. 122
It is worth noting that those corporations in question all happened to be clients of her husband’s law firm, Venable LLP. GNC, Herbalife, AdvoCare International, Vitamin Shoppe, and others were represented by Venable. 123 Indeed, her husband’s office had only months earlier, in January, represented Walgreens in a case involving false advertising claims. Though the lawsuit was dismissed, the possibility of another class action case remained. 124
Herbalife was one of Venable’s large clients, paying the firm for thousands of hours of legal work. 125 Herbalife had been the subject of a standing court order since 1986 concerning its advertising claims and practices. 126 Critics point out that Harris declined to enforce those standing court orders. 127
As Harris was deciding on how to deal with the Herbalife matter, the company’s lobbying firm threw her a fund – raiser. On February 26, 2015, the Podesta Group, which specifically represented Herbalife, held a luncheon fund – raiser for Harris in Washington, D.C. 128
In 2015, prosecutors from Harris’s own attorney general’s office based out of San Diego sent her a long memorandum arguing that Herbalife needed to be investigated. They also requested additional resources to probe further into the company and its practices. Harris declined to investigate or provide the resources — and never offered a reason. 129
By August 2015, Venable LLP promoted Emhoff to managing director of the West Coast operations. 130
This was not the only case in which Harris exercised her prosecutorial powers selectively. Those with the right connections avoided legal scrutiny even in generally clear – cut cases. Governor Jerry Brown was a Harris political ally and endorsed her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. 131 Brown’s sister, Kathleen, joined the board of Sempra Energy in June 2013. In 2015 and 2016, the company suffered “the biggest methane gas leak from a well blowout in US history.” For more than one hundred days gas streamed out of the company’s well. The culprit was a corroded metal lining that had ruptured after long – term exposure to groundwater. 132 It was a major environmental failure by the company. As attorney general, Harris often took on environmental cases with gusto. In this case, Harris’s office refused to investigate the matter. 133
* * *
Political power creates leverage opportunities when a politician wants something from someone.
The Daughters of Charity owned several hospitals in California that were struggling and at risk of being shut down. The charity wanted to sell those hospitals to another nonprofit chain in the hopes of preserving them to serve the local communities in which they were based. The matter required a simple approval by California attorney general Kamala Harris as required by state regulations. A powerful union, United Healthcare Workers West (UHW), threatened to “blow up the deal” by offering to support her bid for the U.S. Senate if she would stymie the sale, and further, threatened to spend it on an opponent if she would not. 134
Founded in Paris in 1633, the Daughters of Charity is dedicated to serving the poor. By the nineteenth century, the order was in the United States and eventually began opening hospitals. As of 2002, the Daughters of Charity Health System (DCHS) consisted of six California hospitals. The system found itself in difficult financial conditions in 2014. 135 The charity was facing serious economic challenges in the changing world of health care. The nonprofit hospital chain had suffered an operating loss of $146 million, so they opened up the sale of the hospitals for a competitive bidding process that lasted thirteen months and brought in more than two hundred bids. Daughters of Charity selected a bid from Prime Healthcare Services for $843 million. The choice was simple, as Prime Healthcare’s was the only bid that promised to honor a $250 million unfunded pension for 17,000 current and former employees; maintain the facilities for at least five years, ensuring that communities would not immediately close money – losing hospitals; commit $250 million in capital expenditures; and maintain the existing union contracts with employees. Prime Healthcare had a history of good performance in these circumstances. Over the previous fifteen years, they had acquired thirty – five hospitals around the United States that were either bankrupt or in deep financial trouble and had managed to save every one of them. 136
As California attorney general, Harris spent lots of time deciding which legal cases to bring and how to defend the state in court. She also had a role in providing regulatory approval. Which meant, of course, leverage over companies.
One of her regulatory responsibilities was the Non – Profit Hospital Transfer Statute, which meant she needed to approve such transactions as the Prime Healthcare acquisition of Daughters of Charity. Not only had the Daughters of Charity Hospital voted in favor of Prime’s bid as the “best and only” option to keep the hospitals open, but also a broad coalition of groups supported Prime Healthcare’s proposal. The California National Organization for Women and the California State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) supported the bid. So, too, did newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times . Indeed, the California Nursing Association (CNA), which represented 90,000 registered nurses in California, came out in support. 137
But powerful political allies of Harris’s did not like the deal. In particular, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), UHW’s parent union, was strongly opposed. The union was a longtime backer of Harris and she coveted their support as she looked to run for the U.S. Senate in 2016. During her 2010 and 2014 elections for attorney general, SEIU and UHW had donated more than $204,000. (In 2014, they were her leading campaign contributor.) They also provided millions more through political action committees. Executives involved in the deal heard that the SEIU was promising Harris $25 million through SEIU COPE, the national political action committee, if she squelched the deal. 138
SEIU leaders hated Prime Healthcare. The nonprofit chain had a good working relationship with many unions, including the California Nurses Association, but SEIU was not among them. SEIU wanted full unionization of all of Prime’s California hospitals. They also wanted to unionize the nurses under their UHW, but the CNA already represented the nurses at Prime. 139
Public hearings were held in the affected communities by Daughters of Charity, and there was “overwhelming support” for the sale of DCHS to Prime. 140
But the nonprofit chain refused SEIU’s demands. 141
According to a lawsuit file by Prime Healthcare, SEIU officials boldly told the head of Prime Healthcare that unless they allowed their union to take over representation of the nurses, Harris would not approve the deal. If true, it was an extraordinary statement from union officials: they would dictate the regulatory approval of the transaction. 142
Prime Healthcare also alleged that Harris’s office informed advisors for DCHS that the attorney general would approve the deal only if Prime allowed SEIU – UHW to unionize the chain. 143 The Daughters of Charity ended up filing a lawsuit against the SEIU – UHW accusing the union of extortion. 144
The Prime Healthcare complaint against Harris claimed that on February 20, 2015, Harris publicly “approved” the transaction, but put impossible conditions on the deal. These were essentially “poison pill” requirements that her office knew would not be approved by Prime Healthcare. Indeed, the list of three hundred conditions was seventy – seven pages long. Furthermore, those conditions were nonnegotiable. The attorney general of California had never imposed such conditions on a hospital sale before. The consultant that Harris had brought in to review the deal had not suggested these conditions, according to the complaint. Indeed, senior executives from Harris’s office allegedly informed Prime Healthcare that the conditions “were from the Attorney General, herself.” 145
This was not the first time Harris had allegedly blocked a deal involving Prime Healthcare, which claimed that back in 2011, SEIU officials took credit for getting Harris to block Prime Healthcare’s acquisition of Victor Valley Community Hospital (VVCH). Although the independent consultant hired by Harris’s office had allegedly recommended approving the deal, the attorney general said no. 146
Instead, the complaint alleged that Harris wanted Victor Valley Community Hospital to support a bid by a competitor, KPC Global. She placed no conditions on the KPC Global purchase — even on fees or reimbursements — even though VVCH was a nonprofit hospital. When Victor Valley Hospital board members protested the decision, Harris allegedly threatened them with criminal investigations from her office and possible termination from the hospital board. 147
SEIU leaders bragged to hospital executives about their power. On July 24, 2014, union boss Dave Regan told Dr. Prem Reddy, head of Prime Healthcare, that as long as the nonprofit resisted his efforts to unionize the hospitals, there would be no Prime Healthcare deals in California. He allegedly told Reddy that Harris was “his politician” and she “would do what [he] told her to.” 148
For the Daughters of Charity deal, SEIU favored a strange alternative, which, as alleged by Prime Healthcare, demonstrates where their interest actually stood. They did not push for a nonprofit chain like Prime Healthcare to take over the Charity hospitals; instead, they pushed for a New York City – based investment fund called Blue Wolf Capital Partners. The private equity firm had zero experience in operating hospitals. What they did have was close ties to organized labor and the Democratic Party. 149
The Blue Wolf deal never materialized, but Harris had other ideas.
Having squelched the purchase of a nonprofit hospital chain by another nonprofit chain, Harris then jumped and offered conditional approval for Blue Mountain Capital to manage the hospital through one of its subsidiaries. 150 The deal was quite extraordinary and frankly bizarre, even though, unlike what Prime Healthcare had proposed, it would maintain the hospitals as nonprofit entities. Blue Mountain Capital had a hard – charging reputation in financial circles and had been neck – deep in the credit swap debacle back in 2008. 151 And in this particular case, Harris was approving a deal that was far worse for patients, according to Prime Healthcare’s complaint. She allowed Blue Mountain to cut services that Prime Healthcare had promised to keep open. For Prime Healthcare, she had said that women’s health services were required to remain open, for example, something that Prime Healthcare said it would do. Harris was allegedly allowing Blue Mountain Capital to close such services. 152
Harris’s approval of the purchase was remarkable. “I cannot recall a hedge fund incursion of any scale, let alone on this scale,” said Richard B. Spohn, a partner in the law firm Nossaman LLP’s health care practice. “It’s anomalous and it’s portentous in sort of an ominous way. The monetization of nonprofit assets in this fashion is worrisome.” 153
Blue Mountain Capital is headed by Andrew Feldstein, who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party. His wife, Jane Veron, is also a major donor to the party, contributing tens of thousands of dollars. 154
Harris has used her powers as a prosecutor to leverage her rise to power, and protect corrupt allies and friends. But sometimes leverage is exercised through the proxy of family.

Posted in California, Kamala Harris | Comments Off on The Kamala Harris Chapter In Peter Schweizer’s 2020 Book – Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite

Interrogating Kamala Harris’s Black Identity (8-1-24)

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Your identity does not belong only to you, it also belongs to the people who think of you
09:00 NYT: How dare Trump doubt Kamala!, https://www.stevesailer.net/p/nyt-how-dare-trump-doubt-kamala
43:00 Kamala Harris chapter in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, https://www.amazon.com/Profiles-Corruption-Peter-Schweizer/dp/006289790X
1:02:30 Kamala is relatable
1:09:00 Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156337
1:22:00 Kip joins to talk about the origins of rap.
1:24:00 Bart Whiteman, actor, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_Whiteman
1:39:00 Israel v Hezbollah, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH0ewmNlFc8

Olympics reveal different peoples have different gifts (8-1-24)

Posted in Kamala Harris | Comments Off on Interrogating Kamala Harris’s Black Identity (8-1-24)