Kamala Harris: For the People

By mid-July, I had reached the acceptance phase of grief.

After the disastrous Biden debate on June 27 in Atlanta, I cycled through the phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Acceptance. You are here. Trump was going to win this thing and impose fascism on the country.

When friends asked for my opinion, I would simply say, “We’re fucked.”

The noise of the political debate slipped away. My task now was to figure out how to survive the upcoming tyranny.

No way could I be chronically online. I could scarcely bare to watch the news, especially after the attempt on Trump’s life on July 13 and the iconic images that resulted from it. His cult now thought him immortal. Instead, I would have to go offline, to blind myself to the terrible summer of 2024.

To pull myself away from the online world, I decided to read more. Big fat history books full of horror. The more awful, the better, for they provided a much needed sense of perspective. No matter how bad things got in this timeline, at least I wasn’t enslaved in the silver mines of Potosi for the Spanish King.

As Democratic elites clung to Biden, insisting that everything was fine (don’t believe the polls!), I was engrossed by 1493 by Charles C. Mann, the panoramic account of the world Columbus made when he sailed across the ocean blue. In his wake, empires fell, plagues claimed millions and the climate itself was changed.

Hopelessly, I went to the Pass the Torch demonstration on July 20th, snapping photos in the rain, as people begged for Biden to quit the race. He wasn’t in DC and had barely appeared in public, spending most of his time at his Delaware beach house.

As a Gen Xer, I knew one thing for sure: Baby Boomers don’t give up power. Doom overwhelmed me.

The next day, I retreated into the calamitous world of 1493, finding comfort in the horrors of history.

And then I got a text: Biden was dropping out.

July 21, 2024. Less than a month after his disastrous debate, a Boomer had done the unthinkable: pass the torch.

Kamala Harris came out swinging. Gone was the gloom of the doddering Biden campaign, replaced with an unmistakeable energy and a new message: FREEDOM! Belted out by Beyonce in a glorious moment of joy.

We are the freedom party. Republicans are the ones who want to control women’s bodies, ban books and take away your right to vote. Democrats want you to be happy, prosperous and free.

It’s such a delightful inversion of tropes. For years, I’ve listened to chud groups in DC shout “Freedom!” as they conspire to end democracy.

But, wait, there’s more. Mockery. In my viral moment as Red Bike Guy, when I roasted the Patriot Front for being sloppy, I had seen how powerful mockery can be, for it communicates that we’re not afraid of you, we think you’re a joke.

The Harris campaign embraced this tactic, pointing out the essential weirdness of Trump and his movement, something I had seen with the bucket-pooping 1776 Restoration Movement and Ashli Babbitt death cult outside the DC Jail known as Freedom Corner. These people with their strange costumes, ritualized chanting and Qanon beliefs, were just plain weird. And Democrats were gleefully pointing it out.

I was energized – as were millions of other Americans – my acceptance phase vaporized by a new-found hope on a warm Sunday in Washington, DC.

Trump is a weak man. Facing the prospect of defeat, he’s lashing out with overt racism, like saying that Kamala Harris just recently became black. He will drag the entire Republican Party into the abyss and leave his followers behind, broken and abandoned.

Posters have appeared on the streets of DC, like the one pictured above. “For the People,” it reads, referencing Kamala Harris’s days as a prosecutor.

But it’s more than that. Kamala Harris gave us what we needed: a champion. Someone to lead the fight. A happy warrior fighting for the people.

We can win this thing.