Most people don’t truly appreciate the rarity and value of democracy until they lose it. Democracy rests ultimately in the good sense of the people and the belief that ‘the mob will work them out’. I fear that in three months, Americans will discover the truth of the first and invalidate the second proposition. A Kamala Harris victory would mean that a ruthless enough party elite has the capacity to lie, manipulate, censor, bribe and intimidate its way into staying in power. This would drive a stake through the heart of American democracy.

Let’s pivot from Donald Trump’s to Kamala Harris’s character flaws. On 24 July, popular podcast host Megyn Kelly recalled how in 1994, a 29-year-old Harris slept her way up California’s Democratic greasy power pole via a relationship with powerbroker Willie Brown, Speaker of the California Assembly at the time and later San Francisco’s mayor who was more than double her age. He appointed her to high-profile and well-paid board positions. Her career has never looked back. Yet we cannot talk about it openly, Janice Fiamengo commented caustically on 23 August, because of her ‘female privilege’. ‘If men are to be harshly condemned for exploiting their power for sexual access,’ Fiamengo asks, ‘then why are women held guiltless when they exploit their sexual power’ in choosing to trade [their] body for political profit’. Echo answers why.

Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court by Trump in 2018. The Senate confirmation hearings took place at the combustible confluence, in the name of social justice, of identity-based victimhood narratives and bitterly partisan politics when allegations of misdeeds were weaponised in efforts to destroy political opponents to gain or hold on to power. Kavanaugh was subjected to a vicious character assassination based on uncorroborated, and in some cases demonstrably false and contradicted details and evidence, concerning an allegation of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford, a Democrat voter, going back to his days in high school in the early 1980s. The character assassination began with a last-minute plausible but unproven accusation, moved to charges that were salacious but implausible and imploded with lurid allegations of serial gang rapes. The Democrats, with Harris a lead performer, cynically trashed three cardinal principles of American constitutional justice: the rule of law, due process and the presumption of innocence.

The media gave prominent and extensive coverage to the most lurid and absurd allegations with no effort to verify and cross-check an often obfuscating Ford’s claims. But they chose to run a protection racket for Joe Biden when Tara Reade alleged an assault in 1993. Her charges were more recent, more specific, against someone from the same political party, with some contemporaneous evidence of discussing it with others, and involved a senator, now running for the nation’s highest office, misbehaving with a junior aide. ‘After the courageous and compelling testimony’ from Ford, Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams tweeted, ‘I believe women, and I believe survivors of violence always deserve to be supported.’ After the allegations against Biden from Reade, she said: ‘I believe Joe Biden.’ The media largely took the same line and covered the story far fewer times, less prominently by relegating it to the inside pages in fewer column inches and with more attention to due process and cross-verification requirements. By her own plentiful public statements and aggressive questioning of Kavanaugh during the Senate hearings, Kamala Harris became vice president to a sexual abuser.

In a fiery Democratic primary debate in 2020, Harris clashed with Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard eviscerated Harris with a brutal take-down of her actual record as California Attorney General. Harris never recovered and abandoned her campaign shortly after. Megyn Kelly interviewed Gabbard on 24 July about that seminal primary debate four years ago. Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGvPCu_YN6g.

The exceptionally early timing of the first Biden-Trump debate that exposed the ageing President’s cognitive frailty was not serendipitous but a calculated step in a stage-managed process to crown Harris without the high-risk primary that would again have shown her up as an inauthentic and incoherent airhead. Maureen Dowd argued in the New York Times on 17 August that the party had conducted a successful coup to oust Biden and install Harris. Even though it was the right thing to do and it means the party went to its convention in Chicago feeling exultant, euphoric, exuberant and ecstatic about the ‘glorious coronation’ to come, ‘a jaw-dropping putsch’ is still a putsch. The principal players, Dowd says, were Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Earlier, on 26 July, Victor Davis Hanson argued in the New York Post that in fact the Democrats orchestrated three rapid coups in succession. In 2020, the party elders ‘ossified’ the primary races to weed out other challengers; they conferred the nomination on a cognitively challenged Biden; and this year they defenestrated him despite his incumbency, his 14-million-vote victory in the primaries and the lack of a single primary victory for Harris either in 2020 or in 2024.

Robert F. Kennedy Jnr is spot on in saying that his former party, in which his family has such a storied history, has ‘become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag and Big Money’. On 23 August, in announcing the suspension of his independent campaign to instead support Trump in ten battleground states, Kennedy explained that, ‘In the name of saving democracy’, the Democratic party ‘set itself to dismantling it’ by silencing opposition, disenfranchising primary voters and resorting to censorship, media control and the weaponisation of federal agencies. The party that required ID checks for entry into its convention condemns voter ID requirement as racist. There is no ballot integrity and sufficient indications of irregularities and statistical anomalies to raise understandable suspicions of results as fraudulent. Harris has gone a whole month this close out from the election without a single teleprompter-free speech or unscripted press conference or live audience interaction with unrehearsed Q & A. Her propensity to word salads accurately reflects her lack of clear thinking. Her hand gestures and facial expressions are just weird and sometimes creepy. Her cupboard of accomplishments as VP is bare. She, the party and the media have been busy memory-holing her record and her statements, including their own previous descriptions of her as the Border Czar.

None of this is hidden or difficult to cross-check and verify. Should Harris triumph come November despite this awful record of policy failures, character flaws and intellectual shallowness, it would amount to a terrible indictment of successful mass indoctrination, media censorship and government gaslighting. In that case, President Kamala Harris’ inaugural address will effectively be a requiem for American democracy.