You can’t say we were not warned. In the final days of the presidential campaign, the New York Times, barely staving off a nervous breakdown, is pulling out all the stops in its effort to keep Donald Trump from a second tour in the White House. The Times’s strategy? Link Kamala Harris ever more closely to identity politics.
The Times’s Sunday, October 27, print edition featured a front-page story on Harris’s longstanding “equity efforts.” We are placed in the new vice president’s office, just weeks into her tenure, as she pages through intelligence reports. Is Harris moved by the terrifying complexity of world politics? By the promethean capacities of U.S. spy craft? By her own ignorance in the face of centuries-long conflicts and geographical backwaters that she has never heard of? No. She “was struck by the way two female foreign leaders were described. The reports used adjectives that, in her view, were rarely used to describe male leaders.”
It is natural to fall back on what we know when faced with what we don’t know. But Harris’s recourse to gender theory when confronted by the White House’s foreign policy responsibilities shows how trivial is her store of ready-to-hand concepts. Harris felt so confident in her priorities and in her authority, however, that she ordered up a gender-bias review of intelligence briefing reports dating back years as one of her first exercises of vice presidential power.
The alleged gender stereotyping in descriptions of female leaders would have to be blinding in order to rank high among American foreign policy concerns. In fact, Harris’s study found no bias, despite the occasional “questionable word choice,” as the Times puts it. Nevertheless, Harris had an impact, the Times reports proudly: intelligence officials now are trained in combatting their own implicit bias against female leaders. Briefing reports on foreign leaders are now screened for gender inequities. And Harris demanded intelligence reports on how gender inequalities in other nations weaken their national security—a matter that would seem to be far afield from America’s national interest.
Even before Harris became the premier gender scold of the foreign policy establishment, the Deep State was awash in diversity dogma, its efficiency undoubtedly compromised by subpar diversity hires. Harris made things worse, not only in the intelligence world but across the federal government.
The briefing-book episode proved to be a preview of Harris’s reign. The “vice president put questions about gender and race at the center of many of the policy discussions in her office,” according to the Times. She was always “interested in race and gender,” a former aide said. “We all knew it was really important to her, so we would proactively add that to her briefings. She didn’t have to ask for it.”
Harris has likely never seen a racial disparity that she did not attribute to racism. If black females die of pregnancy-related causes at a higher rate than white females, it is because of “systemic racial inequities and implicit bias,” in her words. Higher rates of obesity, diabetes, smoking, and drug use? Lower rates of attendance at pre- and post-natal care visits and lower rates of compliance with medical instructions? These other possible factors in different rates of maternal mortality may never be considered; the problem is a white medical and political establishment. Harris convened the first full presidential Cabinet ever to discuss racial disparities in maternal health and health care—a topic that the architects of the Constitution’s balance of powers would have regarded with blank amazement. Harris’s office pushed through billions of dollars of new Medicaid coverage for 12 months of postpartum care because of those mortality disparities, regardless of whether that care is actually used.
Harris used the Covid pandemic as a means for advancing “health equity.” She spearheaded $1.5 billion to create a health-care workforce that, in her words, “looks like America” (i.e., a health-care system that puts race above medical qualifications). Harris celebrated the fact that three in four Covid vaccine doses administered at community health centers were administered to “people of color,” as she put it, consistent with her advocacy for race-based medical practice.
Vice President Harris was involved in the multibillion-dollar push to remove lead pipes from black communities. It is doubtful that the benefits of that effort outweigh the costs. She directed billions more in funding for community banks, regardless of their efficiency, since their customers are disproportionately black and Hispanic. In 2022, she called for giving hurricane relief “based on equity”—i.e., based on race. And in a breathtaking violation of the Constitution, this month she promised one million forgivable loans of up to $20,000 each to black business borrowers.
The Times cued up another two stories this week to focus voters on identity politics. Both were drawn from the same source: Michelle Obama’s revolting speech on Saturday October 26 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Obama exemplified what Ann Coulter has called the “Angry Black Female.” Here, Obama berated males in gruesome detail about their alleged indifference to the fate of women’s “bodies”:
If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.
The former First Lady proffered the hilarious thesis that females are discouraged from talking about their bodies and their “reproductive health.” One could have sworn that that is almost all we have been talking about this election season. According to Obama, we need more discussions of menstruation and menopause—presumably, discussions emanating from the White House. Naturally, she sounded the maudlin note that females were prematurely dying because of male indifference. In fact, females live nearly six years longer than males; males die of diabetes at a 60 percent higher rate than females; the male cancer death rate is 189.5 deaths per 100,000, compared with 135.7 cancer deaths per 100,000 women. The federal government showers billions of taxpayer dollars on women’s health initiatives; men get virtually nothing coded to their sex. And yet amazingly, it is women who are underserved, according to Obama’s harangue to insufficiently chivalric males: “And in those terrifying moments when something goes wrong—which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country—let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us . . . And look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel.”
Obama’s speech was the gift that keeps on giving. Two days after the Times’s initial coverage, the paper fashioned another article out of it. This one focused on her claim that Harris faced a “double standard.” Obama’s complaints belong to that timeworn conceit that blacks have to be magnitudes better than whites to be hired, promoted, or admitted to school. The reality today is the opposite: black applicants are welcomed into college, law school, medical school, and business school with test scores far below the white and Asian average. This double standard in favor of blacks continues into and throughout employment. Harris is vice president today because she is a black female. She has many counterparts throughout the federal government and will have many such clones should she become president.
Michelle Obama was a perfect surrogate for Harris. The resentment, self-pity, anger, and delusion in Obama’s speech may be tamped down for now in Harris’s own rhetoric, but they will resurface in a more virulent form should Harris become president. Race and gender preferences will become even more prevalent in federal policy. Color-blind excellence in personnel and grant-making will more often reflect bureaucratic oversight than an institutional value.
The New York Times is so trapped in its ideological bubble that it thinks that highlighting Harris’s history of identity politics will help carry her over the finish line. We are now on notice.
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