Who are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?
On its face, that question sounds ridiculous—perhaps even churlish. Harris is the vice president of the United States. Walz is the second-term governor of Minnesota. Both have been in the public eye for years, and one of them—Harris—ran for president in 2019. By now, their polices ought to have been set in stone, and their agenda ought to be clear to one and all.
But they are not. Indeed, if anything has marked out the early stages of the Harris-Walz campaign, it has been the assiduous attempt to turn the two nominees into a malleable set of “vibes.” As candidates, it seems, Harris and Walz are not running for election so much as they are trying to run around the election. In the first two months of their campaign, they said nothing of consequence. They refused to answer questions. And, whenever one of their past positions was put to them, they simply waved it away. At this stage, as I write this roughly two months before Election Day, one must conclude that the pair’s plan is to skate into the White House on nothing more substantive than the insistence that Harris is “joyful” and the reminder that Walz wears plaid.
Of course, Harris and Walz do have an agenda. They just don’t want you to know what it is. And for good reason! Five years ago, when Harris ran for president, she staked out a set of gun-control positions so extreme that even Joe Biden saw fit to chastise her. Time and time again, Harris promised that, if she were elected president, she would forcefully confiscate every so-called “assault weapon” in the country. “We have to take those guns off the streets,” she said in September 2019, before suggesting that, because she intended to pay their former owners for their loss—with taxpayers’ money!—her proposition was mainstream.
In July, after she was installed as the Democrat nominee, Harris’ team told the press that she no longer held that view. But this reversal is belied by comments that she has made as recently as 2023, when she told the Australian prime minister that “our friends in Australia have demonstrated” the way forward. Australia, lest we forget, imposed a ban on most semi-automatic arms; this included confiscating those already owned.
During the same primary, Harris infamously responded to being told that she had to “be constitutional” by saying, “Well, I mean, I would just say, ‘hey, Joe, instead of saying, ‘no, we can’t,’ let’s say ‘yes, we can,’” and then laughing. Combine this with a long-stated view that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right, and it becomes clear that she accepts no constitutional limits on her power to impose gun-control from on high.
Tim Walz, too, is doing his best to get voters to focus on the façade he has constructed instead of what he has actually done during the last decade or so. “I’m a veteran, a hunter and a gun owner,” Walz likes to tell crowds. But, while Walz did indeed have a solid record on the Second Amendment until 2016, he is now an unmitigated disaster. While in Congress, Walz advanced “universal” background checks, opposed concealed-carry reciprocity and refused even to consider removing suppressors from the NFA. As governor of Minnesota, he signed legislation that established “universal” background checks, set up a “red-flag” system and arbitrarily prohibited certain triggers from being sold. Worse still, at a Harris-Walz rally in August, Walz nodded along while Harris vowed that “when we win in November, we are finally going to pass universal background checks, red-flag laws and an assault-weapons ban.” In for a penny, in for a pound.
America’s voters ought to see right through the disguise.
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