Before I discuss a head-blowing essay (a loooong essay) in New York Magazine arguing that it was not the Democratic Party’s insane, far left, ultra-woke policies that lost the election but that their argument to remain in power wasn’t progressive enough (yes it really does say this), let me relate some of what Kamala Harris said over the weekend when she attended a Broadway show. After the performance, she was fawned over by the performers—you know, actors. My largely deranged Facebook friends from the theater side of my life probably would have behaved similarly.

Kamala said in part, as reported by the New York Post,

“When we think about these moments where we see things that are being taken, but also let’s see it, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. Where there’s a vacancy, let’s fill it. Let us know that the reality is that the progress of our nation has been about the expansion of rights, not the restriction of rights…

…said the woman whose hand-picked selection for Vice-President wants to ban “hate speech” while she insisted that social media should be censored…

“We have to be clear-eyed. And it doesn’t mean we don’t see the beauty in everything. These things all co-exist, but I believe we fight for something, not against something.”

Translation: Ramalamadingdong.

I know, I know: if anyone deserves the pass conferred by the Julie Principle, it’s Harris, at least as long as she fades into the obscurity she so richly deserves along with past national embarrassments like Spiro Agnew, Carol Moseley Braun, Howard Dean and Harold Stassen. I decided her latest attack of word salade niçoise was notable after I read this stunner in the New York Magazine’s ironically named “Intelligencer.” Titled, “Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump: How a misdiagnosis of the 2024 election has calcified into self-defeating conventional wisdom,” the essay by Rebecca Traister is too long to fisk (and so nutsy-cuckoo that it’s not worth the effort), but here are some samples of her reasoning…

• “The first weeks of Trump 2.0 have featured imperialist promises of foreign conquest, unconstitutional power grabs, gargantuan data and national-security breaches, ICE roundups, and the severing of life-saving aid and medical trials to millions around the world. Thrumming behind the whole shebang has been Trump’s promise to eradicate “DEI,” a term that in MAGA-land stands for the encroachment on our public, professional, and political spaces by people who are not straight, cisgendered white men.”
• “Trump has falsely blamed a plane crash on diversity and scrubbed information about HIPAA protection for reproductive care, threatening easier surveillance of reproductive lives. Trump’s cabinet nominees have been accused of sexual assault or of having covered it up. Musk’s team includes the “I was racist before it was cool” guy who also suggested repealing the Civil Rights Act.”
• “Just as every fiber of every testosterone-injected muscle of the executive branch is being flexed in an effort to terrify and threaten people who have still not gained full equality in this country, the press and the dazed opposition remain fixated on the idea that identity politics is what got us here. The problem is that evidence of the unpopularity of “wokeness” — a term for the messy, sometimes pedantic, frequently annoying, occasionally righteous calls for greater awareness of structural privilege based on race, sex, gender, and ability — is thin at best, and at worst undergirds a dangerous misdiagnosis that will ensure Democrats lose again the next time around.”

Traister is convinced that the problem with the Harris campaign was that she tried to represent herself as more moderate when she should have doubled down on the radical positions that got her bounced out of the Presidential primaries in 2020. “Analysts regularly attribute surprise Democratic victories to low-turnout midterms, but at the pinnacle of the “woke” era, Democrats emphatically dominated a presidential contest,” she writes, in a masterpiece of selective history. “In 2020, millions protested racist police violence, sparking a reckoning in which people lost jobs for racist infractions from their past and present. A few Democratic lawmakers did join calls to “defund the police,” and more signaled that they understood the need for criminal-justice reform. Democrats not only won back the White House, but they did so by turning Arizona and Georgia blue and in the process securing two crucial Georgia Senate seats.”

The author apparently missed the pandemic that crashed the economy, her colleagues in journalism burying news that might have helped Tump and the most dubious and untrustworthy election in at least half a century. Oh, and as I have vowed to point out at every opportunity: there has never been a shred of evidence that Derek Chauvin, the cop whose negligence contributed to the death of George Floyd, was a racist or that he would have treated a white perp resisting arrest any differently. But that’s the woke presumed racism trope that Traister and her equivalents champion—and she thinks it’s a winning position. “[H]ad Biden been ten years younger, or inflation a couple of ticks lower, we might not be having this conversation at all. It simply doesn’t track that ideas that helped Democrats win over three cycles can be blamed for their loss in the year they disavowed them,” is her expert analysis.

This woman has a long-running job as a columnist and a guest pass to bloviate on MSNBC, and she gets away with writing dishonest propaganda like that. If Biden had been younger? How about if he hadn’t been obviously senile and babbled like Gabby Johnson in a live Presidential debate? What if the public wasn’t confronted with a full media cover-up of the fact that the nation had a non-functional POTUS and was being run by persons unknown? Never mind Harris’s ambiguous policy stances, did it ever occur to Traister that Harris became the walking poster girl for DEI insanity by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that she couldn’t talk or think clearly without a script?

Clearly it did not. Here’s a “Bias makes you stupid” trail if there ever was one: On September 9 of 2024, Traister wrote, “The People for Kamala Harris: How a women-led movement, born in the devastation of 2016, put Democrats on the brink of making history.” The month before, “Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and the Nice Men of the Left.” In July, she authored, “The Thrill of Taking a Risk on Kamala Harris,” and in the same month, “Why Not Kamala?”

Why not? Hmmmm, let me think…

Traister was partially responsible for the insulting, undemocratic and disastrous decision to try to ram a proven incompetent down America’s metaphorical throat. Now she is incapable of acknowledging how wrong that decision was.

I know I get to this point a lot, but I find myself asking, “If Traister is really serious about what she writes in the essay and not lying her head off, how did she get this way? Who or what is responsible? Let’s see (I’m checking), she’s a Northwestern grad. She was raised on a farm. What killed her ethics alarms? How many people are there like her out there, who are incapable of looking and listening to Kamala Harris and figuring out what anyone should be able to perceive instantly?