The above image was done using stable diffusion using the prompt 'kamala harris and donald trump and jill stein.'
As California's Attorney General, Kamala Harris did everything in her power to prevent the innocent from moving on with their lives after wrongful criminal convictions. While working at the city level in San Francisco, Harris literally laughed in the courtroom as an innocent man named Jamal Trulove was sentenced to prison after her office worked with police to frame him for murder. These were just a couple of the first things that came up when I searched for wrongful convictions that our Vice President might have been connected to. If these are the stories we can easily find on our censored web, imagine the stories that have been buried.
Depriving innocent people of their freedom is a grave offense in any situation. At minimum, it amounts to kidnapping, plus conspiracy when multiple parties are involved. Harris didn't merely abet these crimes. She actually punished the innocent intentionally after they were found to be innocent.
Today, Harris brags about her support for fracking and is endorsed by Dick Cheney. So she's basically a comic book villain. And Donald Trump might well be the most notorious liar in the world. There's no good candidate here. No lesser evil.
Harris promises WWIII and more advanced totalitarian censorship. Trump promises an immigration crackdown and commercial exploitation of the Boundary Waters. These kinds of people are the cause of society's problems. They're dangerous and we should be keeping them far away from the levers of power, not arguing over which one to install in the highest office in the land.
Personally, since Kennedy dropped out of the race, I've decided to vote for Jill Stein. She probably won't win. Her platform is filled with totally unworkable ideas. But she is against war and favors demilitarization. If I'm going to vote for anyone, it's going to be someone who is at least talking about dismantling the war machine.
On immigration, Stein proposes to abolish ICE and grant amnesty to every undocumented person in the United States, then put them all on an expedited path to citizenship. This sounds very radical, but she also proposes addressing the root causes of mass migration using better foreign policy and other measures. Maybe it's worth considering.
Economically, Stein favors a basket of policies designed to better support the lower classes. I'm not sure that most of these policies could be implemented at all, and if they were they could have serious negative economic consequences. Federal rent control might sound good to some people, but would likely end up being a total fiasco. And yet, what we have now is a worsening disaster, so maybe it's worth a try.
Reviewing Stein's platform, one thing that stood out was the complexity of her proposed policies. Politically, they're all what you'd expect in a social democracy, which the United States is not. Growing up in the '90s, I remember when the globally-minded Western egalitarian appeared to be taking over. Francis Fukuyama called it the end of history, when American and European liberalism would become ubiquitous all over the world. Liberal democracy was supposed to become the final form of human government.
Now Fukuyama has been reduced to telling anyone who will listen that liberalism is not an obsolete doctrine. Insofar as it's defined as prioritizing individual rights over specific political orientations, I totally agree. But the meaning of liberal has changed dramatically in recent years. I suspect that only a small percentage of those who identify as liberal today regard individual freedom as important at all.
According to the New Yorker:
Fukuyama stumbles in characterizing neoliberalism as liberal individualism pushed to right-wing extremes. As the historian Quinn Slobodian has argued, the pioneers of neoliberalism were not focused on individuals' rights; they were concerned, primarily, with the institutions of markets. ... After five decades of privatization and austerity around the world, it is nearly impossible to picture any liberal democracy today without its neoliberal institutions. And Fukuyama doesn't really try, offering only a tepid suggestion to redistribute some wealth in order to offset inequality "at a sustainable level, where [social protections] do not undercut incentives and can be supported by public finance on a long-term basis."
So Harris is totally neoliberal but in no way liberal according to the term's original meaning. She's not liberal and neither are most of her followers. Jill Stein is very much a liberal and that might not be so bad. I guess I'd rather have a globally-minded egalitarian in the White House than a warmonger or a protectionist.
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