It almost goes without saying that what Democrats are putting on at the DNC this week in Chicago is a simulacrum of democracy, a mimicry of the excitement and drama that might have come from a deliberative process of Democrat Party voters choosing their presidential candidate.
None of it is real. The DNC has all the trappings of a major political party convention but without any of the substance. Not a single Democrat voter cast a primary ballot for Vice President Kamala Harris, yet Democrats are going through the motions as if that’s exactly what happened.
They even trotted out President Joe Biden—the putative head of the Democrat Party, whose reelection campaign was abruptly ended by party bosses against his will—late on the first night of the convention. It was a mere formality. Biden delivered a slurred, angry speech, full of lies and distortions, and then they shuffled him off to Santa Barbara for the rest of the week, rendering the sitting president a nonparticipant in his own party’s convention.
But Democrats’ fakery goes deeper than just pantomiming a democratic process after executing a coup against the sitting president. The Harris-Walz campaign branding of “joy”—repeated this week ad nauseum by the propaganda press—is obviously fake and forced. By running a campaign almost completely devoid of policy substance or any real interaction with the news media, consisting mostly of staged videos of Harris and Walz yukking it up on the campaign trail or delivering speeches via teleprompter at highly controlled rallies, Democrat Party leaders are essentially running a psy-op on the American electorate.
A big part of that psy-op is to lie and mislead brazenly about everything. On the opening night of the convention, Biden repeated the infamous “very fine people on both sides” hoax and the “suckers and losers” hoax, both of which anyone can easily look up in 30 seconds. He also claimed that 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations have been created under his administration (the actual number is seven), among many other blatant falsehoods.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker repeated the “injecting bleach” line about Donald Trump and Covid. Former President Barack Obama lied about Trump’s tax cuts, claiming they only benefited the wealthy, and about how many jobs have been created under the Biden-Harris administration.
Michelle Obama falsely claimed Trump wants to outlaw IVF. Tim Walz was introduced as a “Command Sergeant Major,” a rank he never achieved. Capitol Police Officer Aquilino Gonell claimed he “almost died” on January 6, when in fact he suffered no injuries. On and on, lie after lie—and of the most lazy and obvious kind.
The biggest lie of all, though, is that President Biden wasn’t forced out of his reelection campaign in what amounted to a coup last month. A key part of that lie is to downplay the fact that Harris is currently the vice president and present her instead as a new entrant to the race who brings new ideas and energy. But she’s been in office for nearly four years now. Biden’s failed policies are her failed policies.
Democrats are caught in a bind here. If they tout Harris as an integral part of the Biden administration, a trusted advisor and partner to the president, who as VP was given real responsibilities, how can they claim she doesn’t then bear responsibility for what’s happened while she’s been in office?
Harris taking the stage and proclaiming, “When I am president, I will bring down the cost of groceries,” elides the reality that she’s been in office since 2021. If she’s so committed to bringing down the cost of groceries, why hasn’t she done something about it? Why is everything so much more expensive than it was before Biden-Harris were in charge?
Same goes for immigration and the border, the economy, foreign policy, and everything else. At some point, Harris will have to explain why she shouldn’t be associated with Biden’s failed presidency.
Or she won’t. She’ll just keep lying about Trump and deflecting tough questions about her role as Biden’s vice president. And the media will let her get away with it. In that case, her candidacy will be plagued by an air of unreality, which is why Democrats are relying on the psy-op.
If Harris continues with her current strategy, we should expect the psy-op to get more intense. We should expect ever more shrill insistence that Harris and Walz are “normal” but Trump and running mate J.D. Vance are “weird”—despite all evidence to the contrary. We should expect more frequent and heavy-handed claims about what a regular guy Walz is (Obama went out of his way to tell us Walz’s flannel shirts are real) and gosh darnit look how joyful and relatable he is.
And of course we should expect a flood of lies, too many to correct, week over week, until the bitter end.
