Kamala Harris has crafted a contrived persona and a phony identity to advance her career, portraying herself as part of a “marginalized group.” The logic is something like this: If she is perceived as part of a victim class (spoiler: she’s not) based on her race, few, if any, will press her on her politics.
A left-wing journalist taking a deep dive in to where Harris really came from would amount to career suicide, given she has hinged her campaign on her supposed identification with “marginalized groups”— that is obviously why no one has, and she can safely assume no one will.
In 2020, during the “racial reckoning” following the death of George Floyd, Harris ran for president telling anyone who would listen that police should be defunded and felons should be granted the right to vote. And just a decade before? Harris was padding her resume by locking people up in California for pot charges. That was, of course, when it was still fashionable in the Democratic Party to be tough on crime.
It was also during her short White House run that she made up a personal anecdote about participating in civil rights protests as a child — which was plagiarized from Martin Luther King Jr. — claiming she, at an age where she could just barely speak, demanded “fweedom.” She proceeded to beat her then-rival Joe Biden over the head with his previous stance on busing, not-so-subtly implying he was a racist — only to then join his ticket as veep.
Now, with less than 100 days before the election, Kamala Harris has found her window of opportunity in a moment where race politics are the beginning and the end of any national debate. So, as she tends to do, Harris has warped her story and beliefs for her own advancement.
But Kamala Harris was never “out here in these streets,” as she claims.
I know that because I grew up on the exact same “streets” she grew up on. I actually lived up the street from where she went to school, and she lived down the street from where I went to school, during the seldom discussed childhood and adolescence she actually spent living in an upperclass enclave in Montreal, Canada.
When Harris was 12, she left Berkeley after her mother got hired to work with McGill University, doing breast cancer research at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital — the hospital I was born in. Her mother is described by local doctors as a “pioneer.”
The neighborhood Harris grew up in is called Westmount, a majority English neighborhood in the French province of Quebec.
She would have definitely experienced segregation living there — but not the kind she has claimed in the last few years to have lived through .
There is no racial hostility in Montreal. Some racial political discourse has been imported from America in more recent years, but that would not really be a part of the cultural awareness or experience of someone who stopped living there before 2020.
Canada does have history of tension with Natives. However, this story isn’t about Elizabeth Warren, so I won’t go there.
Montreal is actually a “melting pot” in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, and has always had a unique ability to accept immigrants of all backgrounds, races and religions, while still maintaining its French culture, due to a series of language and culture laws it began implementing in the 1970’s, until today.
In a story about Kamala Harris’ roots and personal experience, the only segregation she would have experienced would be economic segregation, as Montreal is the most economically segregated city in Canada, according to a study by the University of Toronto.
And in that city, Kamala Harris grew up in the most upscale neighborhood, which, at the time she lived there, was not only the nicest neighborhood in Montreal, but was the richest one in all of Canada. Far from the struggle of “the streets” Harris now purports to have been down with.
According to an op-ed penned by her best friend from her time at Westmount High School, Harris lived with her mother and sister Maya on Grosvener Avenue, in a Victorian home. As her friend explains, Harris enjoyed “family dinners and a stable life.”
That tracks with most people’s lifestyles in that neighborhood— a beautiful, safe, quiet, child-friendly community, with parks, a red brick library with a greenhouse attached to it, an indoor skating rink just across the street from where she went to high school, synagogues, churches. If you take a walk around the community — which requires some level of fitness as it spans the side of a mountain — you’ll see kids (of all races and ethnicities) in their uniform suits and ties walking their dogs after school, playing on local sports teams, pairs of moms out jogging together, nannies pushing toddlers in carriages.
It’s one of the luckiest places someone could live. Harris implying that it’s the “streets” is like an ironic joke many who grow up there make.
Watching her, as someone who grew up the same way, in the same place, with the same culture, I am stunned at the person she portrays herself to be.
If anyone reading this column listens to my radio interviews on Breitbart News Daily, they know I pronounce the current year as “twenty-twenty-four,” with trademark Canadian hard T’s and R’s. Kamala Harris, who grew up literally 8 blocks west of me, now pronounces the current year “tweny-tweny-fow.” She would never have even heard someone speaking that way growing up, let alone lived among people who speak with that accent, let alone somehow adopted that accent organically.
Kamala unveils a new accent in Atlanta:
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 30, 2024
pic.twitter.com/qju5sT6qIV
This isn’t “code switching.” This is lying, deceit, and the kind of shameless fabrication and flouting of facts that Harris and Democrats constantly accuse Donald Trump of doing. I’d be more likely to buy her “code switching” if she said, “deux mille vingt-quatre.”
Watching Harris, as someone who grew up the same way, in the same place, with the same culture, I am stunned at her alluding to coming from a place of marginalization, oppression, or strife, even remotely. It can’t be overstated how preposterous that claim is. It’s actually laughable, ridiculous — completely made up.
Kamala Harris has created a chameleon-like persona and has heralded policies based on what is politically convenient at any given moment, for the purpose of exploiting opportunity for herself to get ahead. And it’s worked (so far). She has found herself running for president in a moment where the media and elites are too dumb (or too lazy, or both) to analyze policy, and instead focus solely on physical traits, like race.
“Her multiple identities is [sic] actually her superpower in this moment,” Glynda Carr, the CEO of Higher Heights for America, told CNN in an article titled, “‘Her extraordinary origin story could help expand the base’: Diverse donors race to help Harris make history.”
What “extraordinary origin story”? That her mom was a doctor who brought her up on Grosvener? Do I also have an “extraordinary origin story” from Redfern? Neither of my parents even have university degrees! Am I even more “extraordinary”? I never thought of my “origin story” — which apparently means the way one grew up, and where they came from to get where they are — that way, but maybe now I should.
Unfortunately, due to the media-driven obsession with things that don’t matter but require zero thought, Kamala Harris is a person of immense privilege, who is now appropriating actually oppressed people’s culture to get ahead.
And with a multi-billion-dollar media and billion-dollar donors setting her up to wave away conversation about her insane policy agenda, who could blame her?
Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News News. Email her at
