Kamala Harris corrupts the meaning of freedom

At long last, Vice President Kamala Harris has a campaign website with a policy page. It repeats a concerning notion of freedom.

Harris’s page lays out a platform in four sections, including her plan for an “opportunity economy,” border security, and standard Democratic social issues. It gives some idea of how the Harris administration would go about tackling these things by the various policy approaches written into each subsection. The rest reads somewhat like a list of values garnished with several sentences on things Harris has said or done to date.

The section in which she promises to “safeguard our fundamental freedoms” is particularly vacuous. It contains only abortion, or “reproductive freedom,” and LGBT activism, as well as a brief advertisement for freedom to vote . These are the Democratic Party’s dearest issues, and their framing makes sure of it.

Not freedom of speech, or life, or religion, or freedom to a fair trial — none of these are included or even alluded to among the fundamental freedoms on Harris’s page. Perhaps Harris thinks these rights are well enough safeguarded for the time being. It seems unlikely that this is the case, though, given the standard “freedoms and democracy are at stake” talking point .

Rather, the Harris campaign promotes the restriction of free speech on many levels. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has issued a statement revealing the Biden administration’s pressure on Facebook to censor its content on COVID-19. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Harris’s running mate, has said he sees “no guarantee for free speech” related to misinformation and hate speech. Under a Democratic regime, “hate speech” can be just about anything.

But so can freedom of speech be anything, Harris implies. Making LGBT and abortion issues representative of fundamental freedoms, she speaks to a broad grouping of fundamental rights. The “freedom to love who you love openly and with pride” is the ultimate expression of free speech. Freedom of decision “about your own body” is the ultimate human judgment on a right to life.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

These fundamental principles of the vice president’s platform are clearly just her values. They are the same values she refers to when she insists her “values have not changed,” just her policies have.

If Harris’s policies and values are interchangeable under the heading of fundamental freedoms, what does this mean for our actual rights? Surely, she cannot be the defender of democracy that her party touts.