RUTHFULLY YOURS

At her rallies, Vice President Kamala Harris has been portraying the November election as a “fight for freedom.” That’s right coming from someone who spent her entire career attacking freedom – like those enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

In Milwaukee last week, Harris started the crowd chanting “We’re not going back!” After going back and forth with the audience, Harris then says:

“And I’ll tell you why we’re not going back, because ours is a fight for the future. And it is a fight for freedom.”

What are the freedoms she’s talking about? She can only conjure up three.

“The sacred freedom to vote.”

“To live safe from the terror of gun violence”

And ….

“Reproductive freedom.”

It’s not just that this list is so crabbed, it’s what lies underneath each of these “freedoms” that is truly revealing.

”Freedom to vote.” What Harris really means is “freedom to cheat” because Harris equates any attempt to prevent election fraud with disenfranchising voters.

Common-sense laws such as requiring that voters present an ID, making sure absentee ballots are legitimate, cleaning up registration rolls, and banning ballot harvesting are, she says, “designed, I believe, to make it harder for you to vote, so that you don’t vote.” Never mind that most Americans want these reforms enacted.

“Gun violence.” By freedom from gun violence, Harris means taking away the freedom of lawful citizens to own guns — a freedom enshrined in the Constitution.

Harris once pledged to issue a gun ban by presidential executive fiat and laughed when Joe Biden pointed out that the Constitution would pose a problem.

Last year, Harris complained that “gun violence has terrorized and traumatized so many of our communities in the United States.” She went on: “And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way – as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.”

She was referring to Australia’s gun laws, where citizens don’t have a right to own a gun and must prove to the government that they have a genuine need for one (and self-defense doesn’t count), and where the government not long ago imposed a mandatory buyback program that claimed 700,000 weapons.

In other words, she wants to tear up the Second Amendment.

It’s also worth noting that Harris is coldly indifferent to the freedom of Americans not to be raped, run over, knifed to death, and shot by illegal immigrants, more than 10 million of whom she’s let into the country.

“Reproductive freedom.” Harris means that women should have an unfettered freedom to abort their unborn children. It’s unlikely that’s what Thomas Jefferson meant when he talked about an unalienable right to life.

For Harris to be talking about freedom at all is a laugh. As she has demonstrated throughout her career, she is an authoritarian at heart – always eager and willing to use the tyrannical power of the state to impose her will on the great unwashed.

As National Review’s Dan McLaughlin put it, Harris “is a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith, or reputations of anyone in her way.

“The overall picture of Harris’ record is one that ought to alarm anyone who believes in limited constitutional government and individual liberty.”

McLaughlin goes on to recite a long list of particulars:

• As California attorney general, she went after David Daleiden for the crime of exposing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in illegal trafficking of body parts harvested from aborted babies — a flagrant attack on the right to a free press.
• She tried to force nonprofits to disclose donor lists, which was ruled a clear violation of the First Amendment.
• Before calling off her dismal 2020 campaign for president, she proposed rewriting immigration law by executive fiat, a violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
• Harris said she’d chuck the Senate filibuster to get the oppressive Green New Deal passed, which would deny people the freedom to drive the cars they want, buy the appliances they want, start businesses without government permission, and so on.

The great conservative sage M. Stanton Evans once said “A modern liberal is someone who doesn’t care what you do, as long as it’s compulsory.” That is a perfect description of what Harris means when she talks about “freedom.”