Who even is Kamala Harris anymore?

About five minutes ago, the one Democrat more certain to lose to Donald Trump than Joe Biden was his widely ridiculed vice president. Party wonks despaired that their elderly candidate was handicapped by a veep whose prospective ascendence to the presidency terrified voters. Dems anguished about needing to sideline an unpopular “woman of color.” Remember the many theories about how best to get shed of the woman — perhaps with the booby prize of a Supreme Court seat?

Five minutes ago, Republicans gleefully celebrated that, by honoring the crude rubrics of identity politics, Democrats had burdened themselves with an incompetent diversity hire. I, too, briefly shrugged off Biden’s endorsement of his VP to replace him atop the 2024 ticket. “Right, buddy,” I thought, “and she’ll lose.”

For these puppet masters, Harris is the ideal candidate: out of her depth and easy to manipulate

I greatly underestimated the awesome power of the Democratic Medusa, whose snakes writhe into, wrap around and infest nearly every American institution, particularly the press.

For a moment (the horror), the Medusa lost control of the Dems’ beloved “narrative.” Irresponsibly allowed access to original sources, the audience of June’s Biden-Trump debate couldn’t be bullied into unseeing what they saw. Literally overnight — the New York Times demanded Biden leave the race a mere twenty hours after the debate revealed the very cognitive decline the Times itself had long concealed — the Medusa set about Biden’s merciless political assassination, less like death by sharp-shooter than a three-week tribal clubbing. It worked.

Yet even more staggering was last week’s makeover of Kamala Harris, transformed within hours from a babbling, giggling, dim-witted electoral ball and chain to a smart, inspiring, forceful and eloquent standard bearer for freedom, justice and democracy. Think Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, who’d never met a consonant she couldn’t glottalize, sweeping majestically into the ball in her dazzling white dress to greet guests, Hooow do you dooo?, caressing the big round beautiful vowels of aristocracy.

The American media’s instantaneous overhaul of Harris has been perfectly co-ordinated and relentless. With the same collusive commitment with which they’d so recently disguised Biden’s glaring mental failings, commentators and celebrities alike have sung the praises of a woman who the week before was a standard butt of stand-up. Aside from Fox and a handful of podcasters and Substackers, dissenters are either stifled or coerced into being converts. On Sunday, the Times ran the essay: “I was a Kamala Harris skeptic. Here’s how I got coconut pilled.”

The frog-to-princess transmutation has been amazing to watch but also chilling. The US no longer enjoys an independent press. The American fourth estate is almost entirely an arm of the Democratic Party.

Presently, the buzz regards which running mate Harris will pick, but seriously, she won’t pick anyone, any more than she’ll write her stump speeches or craft her policies. Kamala Harris will do as she’s told. Her minders will choose her VP. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but the same cabal capable of ousting a sitting president from his re-election bid effectively over his own dead body is currently in the driving seat. We’ve seen them shield Biden, we’ve seen them all but murder Biden, and now we’re seeing them pretty up their sow’s ear into a silk purse. They think they control reality.

Aware that a porous southern border is Harris’s Achilles’ heel, the Medusa has mobilized. Harris was never a “border czar!” Harris was asked only to address the “root causes” of migration from three little countries! Never mind that in footage on the public record, Biden clearly bestowed responsibility for a chaotic southern border on his vice president. History has been rewritten. Now Harris isn’t vulnerable on rampant illegal immigration, because the border was never her job. And that’s just the masterly shapeshifting of week one.

The next do-over will erase Harris’s political record. She’ll be transformed from the formerly second-most left-wing member of the Senate to a safe, sensible, law-and-order centrist. Magically, she’ll never have advocated defunding the police, abolishing private health insurance, fundraising bail for violent Antifa rioters, elevating anti-meritocratic equal-outcomes “equity” over boring old equality of opportunity, banning fracking, decriminalizing illegal immigration, providing free health care to illegals and eliminating ICE. We’ll be expected to politely overlook that anyone who dons a different set of beliefs like putting on a new dress never had real convictions to begin with. In her own words “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” Kamala Harris will be who they tell you she is.

At this point, it’s hardly paranoid to accept that there is a “they:” the same people who’ve controlled the Biden administration from day one. They’re obsessed with race, captivated by radical gender ideology, in love with racial quotas, blindly devoted to self-harming net zero, festive about open borders and oblivious to pitching trillions down a rathole with borrowed money. Long a genuine centrist, Biden lurched wildly left as president. You needn’t be able to see a strong wind to infer from a bent tree that it’s being subjected to a powerful force.

That force comprises individual people — ex-presidents, advisors from previous administrations, wealthy donors. Call them what you will — the “elite,” the “establishment,” the “oligarchs” — the label hardly matters. Harris will doubtless be sold as a “change candidate.” Yet should she win, there will be no change. The same people in control now will remain in control. For these puppet masters, Harris is the ideal candidate: out of her depth and easy to manipulate. In the campaign, she’ll be tethered tightly to the teleprompter and rarely permitted to speak extemporaneously, lest she betray a lifetime inability to think on her feet. If she wins, she’ll be lost. When told what to do, she’ll be grateful. In a crisis, the rest of the world won’t be.

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This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.