Her Father’s Daughter: Donald Harris’ Hidden Influence on Kamala | The Gateway Pundit

This story initially was revealed by Real Clear Wire

By Paul Sperry
Actual Clear Wire

“If there may be any advantage within the writing of this guide, it springs from the sacrifices knowingly or unknowingly made by my two daughters, Kamala and Maya,” Donald J. Harris wrote in 1977 when he was an economics professor at Stanford College. “In return, it’s devoted to them.”

The book, “Capital Accumulation and Revenue Distribution,” is a 313-page critique of capitalism and its allegedly inherent flaws, together with “revenue inequality,” “cyclical disturbances,” and “exploitation” of staff. “Drawing upon sure components of Marxian concept,” the preface says, Harris approvingly cites the socialist nostrums of Karl Marx and his accomplice Friedrich Engels – as nicely as Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of communist Russia – to make his case for an “different” financial mannequin in America.

Kamala Harris was 13 on the time. 5 years later, she majored in economics at Howard College in Washington, D.C., the place she led an economics club based within the identify of black Marxist Abram Harris.

Such details could be unexceptional however for the Harris marketing campaign’s narrative that the presidential candidate has little to do along with her father. A New York Instances article reported this month that the 2 have “been estranged for years” and “seldom converse.” The Instances even repeated rumors he was a no-show on the Democratic conference, one other signal of their alleged “chilly battle.”

Whereas the vagaries of household relationships are sometimes complicated and hidden from view, RealClearInvestigation’s examination of the six-decade relationship between father and daughter suggests they’ve been nearer than the marketing campaign lets on. Whereas there may be little proof to assist Donald Trump’s declare that Kamala Harris is a “Communist,” the report exhibits that Donald Harris’ left-wing views resonate together with his daughter. In a marketing campaign that has supplied little coverage dialogue, her perspective additionally suggests how she may govern.

Regardless of her mom taking custody of the 2 daughters following a 1971 divorce, Kamala Harris echoes her father in each the egalitarian language he used, resembling “social fairness” and “revenue disparities,” and the progressive insurance policies he advocated, together with government-run well being care and expansive authorities poverty packages.

The 12 months earlier than she first ran for president in 2019, her Jamaican-born father wrote an essay for a Jamaican publication by which he recounted instilling a “deep social consciousness” in his oldest daughter. “Kamala was the primary in line to have it planted,” Donald Harris wrote.

Whereas there’s no proof Donald Harris has formally suggested his daughter’s 2024 marketing campaign, he has been extra of a consider her life and mental improvement than is usually understood. And whereas he doesn’t present up in White Home guests logs, it doesn’t imply the 2 haven’t met privately. Property information present the 86-year-old lives in a condominium lower than two miles from the vice presidential mansion the place Kamala Harris lives along with her husband on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. Her father has lived in Washington since Kamala was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016; and again then, they lived proper down the road from one another.

A search of the LexisNexis database of reports articles and public information going again a number of a long time reveals particulars of their relationship by way of the years:

• After her dad and mom break up, Kamala spent her complete summers dwelling along with her father in Palo Alto, Calif., and would usually attend marches and protests with him.
• Donald Harris, or “Don,” as he’s identified, attended Kamala’s highschool commencement in Montreal.
• He took her on journeys to Jamaica not solely to show her about her heritage but additionally in regards to the whites who colonized Jamaica and enslaved its folks. He launched Kamala and her youthful sister to key figures concerned within the island’s socialist wrestle.
• “I’d additionally attempt to clarify to them the contradiction of financial and social life in a ‘poor’ nation, just like the putting juxtaposition of excessive poverty and excessive wealth, whereas working exhausting myself with the federal government of Jamaica to design a plan and acceptable insurance policies to do one thing about these circumstances,” Don Harris recalled in his 2018 essay. Harris was an financial adviser to Jamaica’s socialist politician, Michael Manley.
• After Kamala gained her U.S. Senate seat in 2016, her father despatched her a observe of congratulations, and the 2 celebrated her victory over dinner.
• Don Harris posed with Kamala for {a photograph} in 2018 at a household get-together, which he later posted on a Jamaican website. The 2 are seen standing arm in arm. “All grown up now, Kamala is carving a manner for herself in America,” her father proudly stated in a caption.
• In early 2019, when she introduced her bid for the White Home, her father supplied to provide her and her marketing campaign financial coverage recommendation. However the association soured months later when Kamala gave an interview by which she got here out in assist of legalizing marijuana whereas suggesting that her Jamaican roots made her predisposed to accepting pot-smoking. However Don Harris sternly opposed the “ganja” tradition of Jamaica, arguing it held its folks again, and he publicly scolded his daughter within the Jamaican press.
• The subsequent 12 months, nevertheless, the daddy despatched a letter to Kamala congratulating her on her nomination to the Democratic ticket as Joe Biden’s operating mate. After her 2020 election, the daughter invited him to the inauguration festivities. It’s not clear if Harris, who likes to remain out of the highlight, attended.

Kamala Harris has by no means confirmed publicly she is estranged from her father, whom she famous in her conference speech “taught me to be fearless.” In an email to the Washington Put up in 2021, in truth, Harris stated that she and her father had been on “good phrases.” She has, nevertheless, additionally stated they’re “not shut.”

Although Donald Harris not lectures at Stanford, he nonetheless does consulting and has lately suggested the World Financial institution and the town of Baltimore, amongst different shoppers, on financial points.

Neither the Harris marketing campaign nor Don Harris returned requests for remark.

Radical Politics

In 1961, Donald Jasper Harris immigrated to America and finally earned a PhD from the College of California at Berkeley, the place he accomplished his dissertation, paradoxically, on inflation – a difficulty that has dogged the Biden-Harris administration and his daughter’s marketing campaign. The subsequent 12 months, he joined a radical black Marxist group on campus often called the Afro-American Affiliation, the place he gave lectures on “social inequality.” He met his spouse, a biomedical scientist named Shyamala Gopalan, who shared his leftwing views, at one of many group’s rap classes. They married in 1963. Kamala was born a 12 months later.

The group – which Don Harris known as his “oasis” – refused admission to white college students; included amongst its members had been Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, who would set up a violent breakaway offshoot, the Black Panther Social gathering. The Afro-American Affiliation was additionally enamored with Fidel Castro and the communist takeover of Cuba and organized journeys to Havana in 1963 and 1964 in defiance of a State Division journey ban.

The group, which took younger Kamala on protests and marches within the San Francisco space, had an enduring affect on her. Certainly one of its members, black nationalist Aubrey LaBrie, turned a lifelong household pal. Just like the others, LaBrie believed the underlying reason behind black issues in America was not simply discrimination however free market capitalism. His aunt rented the Harris household a flat within the ’60s and ’70s. When Kamala was sworn in to the Senate, she positioned her hand on an previous Bible that belonged to his aunt, in accordance with revealed experiences.

Whereas enrolled at Berkeley, Kamala’s father shaped a friendship with Malcolm X. “I had the privilege of realizing him personally,” Don Harris revealed in a prolonged column he wrote for the Jamaican newspaper, “The Kingston Gleaner,” in 1965, following the assassination of the civil-rights firebrand.

Harris stated he bonded with Malcolm X over his rejection of each white society and capitalism. Harris complained the black man’s every day expertise “consists of confronting the unscrupulous white landlord, the hostile white policeman, the insensitive white social employee, and if he has a job, the smug white employer.”

In his tribute to Malcolm X, Kamala’s father argued in favor of Malcolm X’s model of resistance, which condoned violence in opposition to “white racists,” in distinction to Martin Luther King’s non-violent method to securing equality. He defined that peaceable civil-rights protesters didn’t have sufficient “actual contact” with “rank-and-file” blacks to grasp their “anger, resentment and frustration” and “take up extra militant positions.” Don Harris additionally considered America as a colonizer of blacks: “Definitely there may be some validity to [Malcolm X’s] comparability of the civil-rights motion [in the U.S.] and the anti-colonial motion in Africa and Asia.”

After graduating from Berkeley, Harris bounced round at quite a few schools educating economics earlier than touchdown a plum project at Stanford in 1972. Because of lobbying by fellow Marxists with the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), Stanford granted Harris a tenured professorship in economics in 1974, in accordance with the Journal of Financial Points.

Some colleagues within the division frowned on his hiring, nevertheless, viewing him as a troublemaker and a foul affect on the scholar physique. A 1976 article revealed in “The Stanford Day by day” campus newspaper stated that school described Harris as a “Marxist scholar” who was “main college students astray” from mainstream economics supporting American capitalism. One other article referred to as him a “radical professor.”

Tyrannies of Capitalism

In 1972, Harris penned a 33-page paper, “The Black Ghetto as Colony,” that examined Karl Marx’s evaluation of the “super-exploitation” of black staff. He claimed that American landlords, retailers, restore outlets, and small producers – the “petty capitalists” – “are powerful and imply with respect to their utility of the capitalist guidelines of the sport. The victims of their toughness and meanness are black staff and customers.” He additionally complained that “company capitalists” profit from “American imperialism.”

Then he superior the Marxist conspiracy concept that capitalists hold blacks in a persistent state of unemployment as a “reserve military” of labor they can faucet into when factories attain full capability. This fashion, he claimed, they’re able to suppress black staff’ wages.

Strikingly, he didn’t blame racism however the revenue “system” for the alleged exploitation of blacks. “It stretches the creativeness to see why, if this had been certainly a chance, black staff ought to in any manner be higher off beneath black house owners than beneath white house owners,” Harris wrote.

In different phrases, the issue of inequality besetting blacks is capitalism, and till it’s remodeled into Marx’s utopian imaginative and prescient of state-enforced equal outcomes, the black situation gained’t enhance.

“Mr. Harris’ work is extra unashamedly Marxist than something in trendy American politics,” The Economist magazine lately editorialized.

Following in her father’s footsteps, Kamala studied economics at Howard College in a program based by black Marxist scholar Abram Lincoln Harris Jr., who argued that capitalism was morally bankrupt.

Kamala, who served as president of the Abram Harris Economics Society, describes herself as a capitalist. However, like her father, she seems to reject free markets in favor of “equity,” which seeks to engineer financial outcomes for blacks. “Everyone ought to find yourself in the identical place,” she has argued, with the identical revenue, property, and belongings. As a result of blacks didn’t begin in the identical place, she explains, they “want extra equitable distribution.”

Her lengthy profession exhibits unwavering assist for presidency welfare packages and race-based preferences and the redistribution of revenue to pay for them. “[We must be] giving assets primarily based on fairness,” she’s said. “In the event you take a look at the truth of who will profit from sure insurance policies, if you take into account that they’re not beginning on the identical place, and so they’re not beginning on equal footing,” she added, “it is going to instantly profit black kids, black households, black owners.”

These concepts are influencing her marketing campaign guarantees, which embrace “absolutely forgivable” loans as much as $20,000 for black entrepreneurs and unspecified “others” and $25,000 for downpayment help for first-time homebuyers. Harris can be providing $6,000 a 12 months in tax credit score funds for low-income households with kids to assist “shut the wealth hole.” To assist pay for these initiatives, she has pledged to lift the company tax charge from 21% to 35%, which is greater than the 28% that President Biden had proposed, and to hike taxes on these incomes greater than $400,000. She additionally proposes rising property taxes, taxing capital positive aspects on shares and residential gross sales at common revenue charges, and, for the primary time in historical past, taxing the unrealized positive aspects of the rich.

In a 2019 interview on ABC’s “The View,” Kamala was even open to the concept of elevating the highest particular person tax charge to as excessive as 80%. “That ought to be mentioned,” she intoned.

In a 2021 interview with Forbes, Kamala argued that capitalism relies on the “false assumption” of equal alternative. “What we have now to do is acknowledge the disparities which have lengthy existed” between whites and blacks and wealthy and poor, and shut them by way of socioeconomic packages, resembling inexpensive housing, assured minimal wage, common well being care, and industrial coverage initiatives.

That is exactly what her father advocated – and advisable in a number of financial blueprints he drafted for the Jamaican authorities over the previous 4 a long time. His government-heavy proposals had been supposed to spice up Jamaica’s anemic financial system. However output languished.

The Jamaican Experiment

If Kamala is given the reins of the U.S. financial system, it gained’t be the primary time a Harris has helped information a nation’s financial insurance policies.

“Harris served in Jamaica as financial coverage advisor to a number of prime ministers together with Michael Manley,” said John P. David, director of the Southern Appalachian Labor College and emeritus professor of economics at West Virginia College Institute of Know-how.

Manley, who died in 1997, idolized Lenin and served as Jamaica’s prime minister from 1972 to 1980 as head of the socialist-leaning Individuals’s Nationwide Social gathering. He returned to energy in 1989 earlier than stepping down in 1992 as a result of poor well being. He was succeeded by P.J. Patterson, who remained in workplace till 2006. The PNP, which leaned towards the Soviet Union till its 1991 collapse, managed the federal government once more from 2012 to 2016.

In his 2018 essay, Don Harris spoke approvingly of “the progressive reforms of the Manley period.” However these durations of socialist “reforms” – which included “value controls” on meals much like what his daughter is proposing – marked a few of the worst in the historical past of the Jamaican financial system.

The Manley regime instantly inserted itself into the administration of the financial system “by imposing a freeze on wages and imposing value controls, nationalizing three foreign-owned banks, and assuming the possession of nearly all of the media,” in accordance with a 1980 U.S. Normal Accounting Workplace report. The authorities additionally established a nationwide minimal wage and, on Harris’ recommendation, broke up massive agricultural holdings into farm co-ops.

Jamaica’s value controls backfired with extreme shortages, the report discovered: “Some grocery store cabinets are practically empty of sure staples, resembling milk and bread.”

Following the identical path, Kamala has introduced she would enact “the first-ever federal ban on value gouging – setting clear guidelines to clarify that huge firms can’t unfairly exploit customers to run up extreme company earnings on meals and groceries.” She stated the pricing guidelines could be enforced by the Federal Commerce Fee.

Economists warn this prescription for taming such inflation will find yourself having the identical bleak outcome as what occurred in Jamaica.

“The important thing assumption behind value controls is the nationalist delusion that some group of policymakers can determine what a ‘truthful’ value is for every good and repair throughout the huge U.S. financial system,” stated Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Belief Advisors in Chicago. “It’s the pretense of the form of central planners who ran the Soviet Union’s financial system for many years.”

“It’s a really unhealthy thought,” he added.

The Jamaican financial system continued to deteriorate throughout the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s beneath the management of Patterson, who softened Manley’s socialist stance and made efforts to liberalize Jamaica’s financial system to draw extra non-public funding.

In 1996, Patterson referred to as on Harris to assist craft the nation’s “nationwide industrial coverage.” Harris’ new reforms, although extra market-friendly, eschewed the “American mannequin” of the person entrepreneur freely pursuing his or her personal desires in favor of a community or “group” of entrepreneurs working collectively towards “long-range” targets inside “a structured framework” and in “partnership” with the “state.” This was higher than simply “settling for fast earnings,” Harris claimed.

His daughter has promised 1 million authorities loans for black entrepreneurs and others in “underserved communities.” It’s not clear what social strings would be hooked up, if any, to beginning their companies.

In 2012, Don Harris returned to Jamaica to assist produce yet one more financial improvement plan for the federal government’s planning institute. His 312-page report proposed establishing a “Nationwide Poverty Discount Coordinating Unit (NRRCU)” to “eradicate” poverty by 2030. He additionally proposed an enormous infrastructure program with targets much like the one the Biden-Harris administration signed into regulation in 2021.

“The problem of obtain sustainable financial development with social fairness stays a matter of main concern,” he wrote.

Patterson credit Harris’ prescriptions for Jamaica’s latest financial turnaround. “He was a useful useful resource,” the previous prime minister lately advised the Washington Put up. “The financial enhancements we’re witnessing immediately had been based on the ideas and the priorities established in his industrial coverage, which have born anticipated fruit.”

Jamaican economist Damien King disagrees, arguing that Harris’ method of redistributing ever-dwindling state assets will harm the nation in the long term. He said that the politics of handouts and redistributing wealth to pay for it solely makes everybody poorer – the center and higher courses, who find yourself paying extra in taxes, in addition to the poor, who wind up depending on authorities succor. King stated the socialist social gathering’s “pandering to the poor” didn’t enhance financial alternatives for Jamaicans.

Even the Jamaican authorities lately reported {that a} post-COVID growth in cruise ship tourism to the island is principally accountable for renewed financial development, not industrial coverage. “Resurgence in tourism spurs financial development in Jamaica,” in accordance with the Statistical Institute of Jamaica.

On the identical time, communist China has been propping up the delicate Jamaican financial system with large loans for brand new infrastructure initiatives together with new freeway building, which has plunged the federal government deeper into debt. The Chinese language are additionally pouring billions of {dollars} into bauxite mining and sugar manufacturing on the island, which can be contributing to its financial rebound.

Two years in the past, Don Harris had no thought his 2012 plan was working. The Jamaican press quoted him blaming the conservative authorities now in energy for not doing extra to repair the “issues plaguing the nation.” He referred to as for a “reordering of the general public sector” to supply extra funding for, and intervention in, the non-public sector. And he slammed the one sector fueling the financial system – resorts – for being too corporatized and importing too many overseas items to produce motels.

Echoing a favourite phrase of the Biden-Harris administration, he stated that “the nation must have an entire authorities method to start to deal with the issues,” doubling down on his perception that greater authorities is at all times the very best answer.

Like Father, Like Daughter

Throughout the debate final month between Trump and Harris, Trump claimed that Kamala is a Marxist secretly attempting to hold her father’s radical mantle into the White Home.

“Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics,” Trump stated. “And he taught her nicely.”

Allies of the Democratic candidate argue she isn’t a Marxist; she simply needs “equitable remedy” for the traditionally deprived.

Though the Harris marketing campaign has sought to airbrush Don Harris out of his daughter’s life, it’s clear there are robust overlaps of their considering and her governance. In 2019, for instance, GovTrack, a non-partisan group that tracks lawmakers’ voting on payments in Congress, ranked Harris the “most liberal in comparison with all Senators,” together with Bernie Sanders. Which means her voting report was to the left of even a self-described socialist, in accordance with Josh Tauberer, GovTrack founder. As well as, Kamala has had her personal radical associations. As San Francisco’s District Legal professional ( 2002-2011), for instance, Harris employed Lateefah Simon, former chief of the militant Marxist group STORM Revolutionary Motion to assist reform the prison justice system. She gave Simon, who’s now operating for Congress in California, a talking spot at this summer season’s Democratic Nationwide Conference.

In a latest interview with Fox Information media critic Howie Kurtz, Trump puzzled why the media hadn’t explored the extent to which Kamala was steeped in radical Marxist ideology. He stated he fears she was born into an anti-American political motion, which she could also be attempting to make use of the presidency to advance.

“Her father’s a Marxist professor of economics. How come no person interviews him?” Trump demanded. Requested why her father’s political persuasion ought to matter, Trump asserted that Kamala has adopted his radical worldview and is now attempting to cowl it up by sounding average, even co-opting a few of his personal MAGA insurance policies.

“Return to when she was defeated by Biden [in 2020], and she or he was radical left. She was most likely past Marxist, if you wish to know the reality,” Trump stated.

“If you’re extra liberal than Bernie Sanders, by rather a lot, this nation can’t have that,” Trump warned. “This nation has to get smart to it. They’ve to search out out.”

Columbia College historical past professor Adam Tooze referred to as Trump’s remarks “the form of foolish nonsense that the GOP circulates when it describes the Democrats as socialist. They clearly aren’t.”

One tutorial who befriended Don Harris within the Nineteen Nineties stated Kamala is very like her father. “I’ve the impression that the press tends to magnify the gap between them within the political sense, with folks saying that he was rather more to the left, extra of a social democrat than she is,” stated Joanilio Teixeira, an emeritus professor of economics on the College of Brasilia, in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper earlier this 12 months.

“I’m conscious, after all, that a few of his theories are very current in his daughter,” Teixeira added. “The query of the distribution of wealth. The query of elevating up folks of African descent. These points are very current in what she says.”

This text was initially revealed by RealClearInvestigations and made obtainable by way of RealClearWire.