From California to Quebec and Back: The Formative Years of an American President-in-Waiting

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) speaks at a hearing at the Capitol Building in Washington on June 25, 2020. (Alexander Drago/Pool/Getty Images)

Commentary

As Joe Biden dodders from one parking lot to another, giving speeches that alternate between the language of Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists and Hallmark greeting card copywriters, Democrats are preparing to cast their ballot for a “Harris–Biden” administration in which, for sentimental reasons, the “Big Guy” will be temporarily permitted to live in the White House.

With these circumstances in mind, it’s worth taking a careful look at the formative years of America’s Democratic presidential candidate-in-waiting, Kamala Harris.

Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California. Her mother and father were both Ph.D. level academics from former British colonies who were steeped in the post-war Labour Party culture of British Fabian socialism.

Her parents divorced when she was 7. As part of Berkeley’s comprehensive desegregation program, young Kamala was bused from her mother’s home in West Berkeley to a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley.

As children, Harris and her sister frequently visited their mother’s family in Chennai on the southeastern coast of India. Kamala says she was strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather, a retired Indian civil servant with progressive views on democracy and women’s rights.

Kamala’s Quebec Legacy

When she was 12, Harris and her sister moved to Montreal, Quebec, with their mother who took up a research position at Jewish General Hospital and a teaching position at McGill University. Harris attended a French-speaking school in the Côte-des-Neiges quarter before transferring to Westmount High School in the exceptionally wealthy and predominately English-speaking liberal-progressive town of Westmount, Quebec.

Harris arrived for her Quebec high school experience precisely at a time when the newly elected social democratic Parti Québécois government was experimenting with a radical new “régime pédagogique” in the province’s schools.

Throughout the 1970s, my own professional participation in Ministry level committees and countless union-sponsored curriculum development seminars had already alerted me to the new direction that had captured the imagination of Quebec teachers. The 1976 PQ electoral victory had ushered out the remnants of Quebec’s liberal “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s and paved the road for a sharp turn to the left in Quebec education.

Among the progressive inspired humanities courses being introduced in Quebec was a new “histoire nationale” that adopted a Marxist analysis of the history of Quebec and North America to the exclusion of all other perspectives. The emergence of the social democratic Parti Quebecois between 1968 and 1979 was given more attention in the course than the entire 350-year history of the Roman Catholic Church in North America.

Teachers and their students concentrated on dark, dialectical historical relationships between “oppressors” and ”oppressed.” Canada’s French–English discord was linked to class and race conflict. Young Quebeckers were no longer taught a liberal history of progress from colony to nation. History courses became a road map for a proposed journey from capitalism to socialism, smokescreens for a neo-Marxist political agenda.

This was the general corpus of thought that would have been introduced to young Kamala during the most impressionable years of her philosophical development.

Back in the USA

The legacy of Kamala Harris’s Quebec high school days appears to have set the tone for her entire adult life.

In an October Epoch Times article, New Zealand author and filmmaker Trevor Loudon pointed to Harris’s longstanding affections for pro-left activists and radical ideas.

From the childhood influence of parents, active in the Berkeley-based radical left “Afro-American Association” to her early adult romantic liaison with then 60-year-old leading California Democrat, Willie Brown, young Kamala was deeply immersed in California’s radical chic community. Kamala began her career as his protégé.

Brown, wrote Loudon, “was first elected to public office with the help of the Communist Party USA youth wing. He was funded by Dr. Carlton Goodlett, a communist newspaper owner, once awarded the Lenin Prize by the government of the former Soviet Union.” Today, Loudon says, “Brown is widely regarded as one of the Chinese Communist Party’s best friends in the Bay Area.”

In the case of Kamala Harris, the proverbial apple never fell too far from the progressive tree. Loudon went on to chronicle a litany of Harris’s own leftist protégés, benefactors, and political staff, as well as her 2014 marriage to American lawyer Douglas Emhoff, whose firm, according to the National Pulse, “boasts nearly 30 years of experience in China and over 140 lawyers dedicated to its ‘China Investment Services’ branch.”

A Final Reality Check

Far be it that a Canadian correspondent should tell Americans how to vote. After all, this is not the New York Times. But it doesn’t take Nostradamus or even a medical doctor to recognize that if Joe Biden is elected in November, a Harris presidency will not be far behind.

Biden is seeking to take his turn in the Oval Office at about the same age as Ronald Reagan completed his two terms of service to the American nation. In anticipation of a victory by either candidate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is already working on clever new ways and means to remove a sitting president from office. This is the clear and present reality of the 2020 presidential contest.

Just the other day, the aging Democratic candidate imagined for a moment that he was still running against George W. Bush. This is not a sign of the mental acuity that times like these require in a leader of the Free World. There’s no dishonor in growing old, but in so doing we should not imagine ourselves to be capable of tasks we’re no longer well suited to perform.

Should Biden be pulled across the finish line with the help of surrogates like Barack and Michelle Obama, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) plus three, the Bernie Bolsheviks, and BLM, America will have a president-in-waiting that owes most of her political success to the radical left.

The totalitarian temptations of big tech, big education, big government, big media, and big entertainment, and the surrender of global influence to the Chinese Communist Party will continue unabated until the free American Republic that the West depends on for the defense of our liberty becomes a nanny state shell of its former self.

If Biden gets elected, Beijing will seek to own America, and Harris will happily step up to close the deal.

William Brooks is a writer and educator based in Montreal. He currently serves as editor of “The Civil Conversation” for Canada’s Civitas Society and is an Epoch Times contributor.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.