A Canadian October Surprise?

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So you know Kamala’s campaign is in trouble when you start seeing the media throwing more Hail Marys than the UNM football team.

Some are more obvious than others.

I saw on CNN this morning an Anderson Cooper special that covered her past 3 ½ years as Vice President. She looked fantastic with plenty of footage of her with world leaders, in the White House Situation Room. She looked poised, confident, the epitome of a leader…. of course that perception was probably helped by the fact that the sound was off.

Then there are others which are more curious.

Headline in today’s Washington Post: “These Five Tumultuous Years in Montreal shaped Kamala Harris.”

I have been waiting more than five years for this story to drop. Long story short, her divorced mother took a job at the prestigious McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal and a young Kamala and her sister moved from sunny California to a foreign land of snow and poutine.

You would think a story like that would be worth something, if not to her campaign in 2019 which crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, then to her as a Vice President trying to cut an image on the international stage. You could have spun it as giving her an international perspective and some heft, she could have used it.

Yet to my knowledge no American media outlet has picked it up, only a passing reference to her friend Wanda Kagan who she met while in Montreal. Even her biography published for her first presidential campaign, “The Truth We Hold,” barely gave it a page. Hold that thought for a minute…

The Post article is full of choice nuggets pushing an angle of that racism and turmoil that Kamala had to endure.

There are the allegations, based on one witness and a lot of loose speculation, of the sexism and racism her mother faced both at the University of California and then in trying to find another job. No word in the article that McGill had a world-class med school and that life in Montreal, while cold five months of the year and juiced with money that looks like it came from a Monopoly game, is actually quite pleasant. However, that would provide a chaff cloud of reality that would deflect from a good story about a young woman’s heroic coming of age in a racist, sexist world.

Toward the end of the article Kamala’s school-age friend, Wanda Kagan, left Montreal:

“Ward felt the city ‘was just too racially divided’ and she returned to her native New York City.”

As for Kamala, after a year at Cégep she attended Howard University in DC where for her:

“The Washington campus was a world away from the racial, ethnic and cultural divisions she had seen so often in Quebec.

“As she settled into a seat at Cramton Auditorium for an orientation in 1982, Harris recalled in her memoir, she realized that everyone looked like her. ‘This is heaven!’ she wrote.”

So both Kamala and Kagan found New York City, and Washington, DC, less of a racial hellhole than a Canadian city? That sort of muddies the water about the narrative of racism. Not to mention that DC, to this day, remains a heavily segregated city. Of course Kamala was writing specifically about her experience at Howard and how she thought it was heaven that everyone looked like her. Hmmm.

So why did this article drop now, and why was it given top of the page treatment by the mouthpiece of the DC swamp? Let’s cover the facts.

We’re little more than 3 weeks before an election that the Left has breathlessly told us (ad nauseam) will determine the future of “our democracy.” We’re also in that critical part of the campaign when we start seeing the “October Surprise.”

At this critical juncture of the campaign, a vital part of Kamala’s media praetorian guard just happens to decide to run a 3000+ word investigative piece covering five years of her life that both she and the rest of the media have deliberately ignored for the past five years.

She spent those five years living not just in another country, but in a distinctly different culture. You would think that for someone desperately trying to establish her bona fides as someone who wasn’t an intellectual lightweight, this would have been something she would wanted to have brought front and center during the past 3 ½ years.

So when a media outlet does finally write about her Montreal experience, it focuses on the racism she encountered in a country that the Left favorably compares to the United States. I never thought I would see the American media report that people had to leave Canada and move to the US for its better racial climate.

Something doesn’t fit. Kamala’s campaign is collapsing and the Washington Post dedicates valuable real estate at the most critical part of the campaign to finally getting around to her time in Montreal?

Is the Washington Post trying to get ahead of something? What exactly happened in Montreal that Kamala and the media (until now) don’t want to talk about?

11 thoughts on “A Canadian October Surprise?”

  1. So . . . does she speak French? She’s never given any indication that she does. Can’t even recall her faking a French accent, which is a surprise, as she fakes many others.

  2. I don’t believe she does speak French. Westmount High is English-speaking and you can get by in Montreal, especially on the western part being pretty uni-lingual. if I remember her autobiography correctly I think she mentioned she took a French-immersion class.

    She never mentioned Westmount in her autobiography, she mentioned Côte-des-Neiges but not where she lived and went to school for 4 out of 5 years?

    Westmount is the heart of the English-speaking community in Quebec and was a hated symbol of the separatists. Discussing Kamala’s Canadian history with a friend a few year’s back I remarked that she basically hung out with “settler colonialists” who, until the rise of PQ, were the commercial class basically ran the city.

    I’m really curious to all of this. Why would the Post assign someone to this? Why now after all these years of silence? The story is actually very favorable to her so why run the story now? Why did they hide the story in the first place?

    Could be nothing, but something is very fishy

  3. Que Mala is a moron who can’t talk or think.

    That’s her problem, not that she used to live in Soviet Canuckistan and left because the hated white devils didn’t look enough like her.

    I can’t imagine anything that would cause her trouble from way back then. Committed leftists will vote and support whomever and whatever they’re told to support, so she could have killed someone and they won’t care. Remember that Josh Shapiro is now being touted as the better pick over Tampon Timmy despite being involved in covering up a murder. Non-leftists either already don’t like her and won’t vote for her or remain so oblivious that they have no idea what’s going on at all, anywhere, on any topic.

    My guess is that this is just more of the typical and banal campaign hagiography that is churned out for every leftist candidate every presidential election and only looks so off-putting because Harris is such an awful candidate with no redeeming qualities of any kind.

    It’s just hard to make the lipstick on a pig look good when the pig is especially ugly and is already hidden under a box covered in hi-rez printouts of the Mona Lisa.

    Pointless, too. She won’t win or lose because of her biography.

  4. I think you’re right, this is an attempt to get out ahead of something, something that may, or may not, surface prior to 05 November.

    I’d bet, though, that it’s something in or around Washington, not Montreal, but her Montreal experience might be “an explanation” for something that followed her to D.C., perhaps evensomething “family related.”

    What’s really interesting, though, is how little information there is about her; everything seems to begin with her ascendency to the position of California Attorney General. I suspect much of that is because of how she got to that spot; with Trump (or, for that matter, any Republican Presidential candidate) we’ve been treated to microscopic examination of every cough, burp and sneeze since he was conceived. Harris? Crickets.

    Three weeks to go and I’m betting that fresh surprises await. Life is supposed to be an adventure, but…..

  5. There is always a problem with induction, making generalizations or predicting importance and future action by observation. You never have perfect conditions; you never have a perfect information set or are sufficiently free of cognitive biases to truly fill in those information blanks.

    However there are things that you observe that are just “weird” and call for a deeper exploration. You act like a detective with puzzle to solve, hold multiple theories. usually it’s like an intelligence officer, you have multiple theories but it’s more like a problem than a puzzle because you’re not sure there is a solution or even if it is a problem. You’re right in the “known, known-unknown, unknown-unknown” conundrum

    The way Kamala buried her Montreal past was always a bit strange, but perhaps a good theory for why is she just calculated that it was too hard to fit into her political narrative; either in California or when she went national in 2019. Hard to explain to people in Iowa how you grew up in French Canada.

    However she’s been struggling for gravitas since she became VP and has tried to use the world stage to accomplish that. Another theory was that one would think out of sheer desperation she could reach back to that unique time in her life to add some weight. However she didn’t. So now we have a pattern

    The same in July when she became the front-runner and nominee, there was a chance to mark her off as somebody with some sophistication as they tried to “reintroduce” her to the country. Especially since that spin would help deflect from her total inability to not come off as a nitwit.

    However now it goes all in? In the last 3 weeks of the campaign when opinions you might have swayed more to you have already hardened? When the noise level is blaring? You’ve lost alot of the initiative. The article told a very complimentary story of her, that really humanized and showed empathy; so why not run this story earlier when it’s been all hands on deck for the past 3 months? Perhaps by doing so it would shine a spotlight on things she didn’t want to come out.

    Why did the Washington Post, one of her biggest supporters, pour those resources in now? The investigative reporter, the front page real estate? This was a story that could have been reported anytime over the past 5 years, but only now when we enter the October Surprise part of the campaign?

    Maybe it was something in Montreal, maybe as Franklin said it was something from Montreal that helps explain her in DC

    Like I said, I have been following this for 5+ years and nothing in the American press. Foreign press yes. What changed?

    The Montreal aspect To Kamala’s

  6. Does she speak French? Probably not. More importantly, does she actually speak English? Jury probably still out on that one.

  7. Just the regular text of the story, at least what I see in the post, seems like a problem for Harris and the Democrats. That is, if a Democrat gets past the headline.

    Looks like she had a bad time in Quebec because French Canadians were a bit racist. Then she came back to America and everything was better. Even better at Howard because everyone looked like her.

    America better than Canada regarding racism? Kamala feeling more comfortable being with her own kind? This is wrongthink for leftists these days.

    But again, I don’t expect these ideas to penetrate a Democrat’s confirmation bias, or even be read. But Democrat strategists can’t take the chance that one of their extremely online constituents might cut a TikTok asking “WTF?” And also, censoring and obscuring negatives about their candidate is a reflex by now, so no big surprise.

  8. One of the commenters at Althouse likes to point out how neither Harris nor Obama were “DOAS” (Descendants of American Slaves) and thus share little of the life experience of the typical middle (to say nothing of lower) class blacks in the US. Given the way Obama stepped in it with the brothas and sistas a couple of days ago, attempting to hector black males into voting for Kamala because melanin and vagina, I expect this article came out to bolster her credentials as being a victim of racism, especially the ‘everyone looked like me’ moment at Howard. All white people are racists, eh?

  10. Traditional French Canadian society is fairly insular. To an American, the shock of an overtly French society and some strong traits leads one to believe that it is all just a North American version of France. However it is very much the culture of the Canadien (or “Les Habitants” as depicted on the Montreal Canadien’s hockey sweater) at its heart.

    Keep in mind the millions of white French speakers are dependents of the 70,000 inhabitants who lived in Quebec at the the time of the British conquest in 1763 after which immigration from France was largely shut off. Accordingly traditional Canadien culture is a “splinter” society, more closely linked to the French culture of early to mid-1700s; traditional Catholic, peasants and insular.

    I’m being a but simplistic here but people forget that the French Revolution had little to no contemporaneous effect on Quebec. If you want to have some fun ask someone from France who has been to Quebec what they think of the local dialect there’ Quebecois is far from Parisian French.

    When Kamala was in Montreal, she was there when French Canada was modernizing, With the Quiet Revolution it began its transition from a very traditional, Catholic nation to something like it is today. It also marked the rise of Canadien nationalism, with the PQ and she was there for the sovereignty referendum in 1980 where Quebec independence was barely defeated.

    So she got the worse of both worlds. A time when the insular Canadien culture was very strong and there weren’t many non-white people; the immigration waves from Francophone Indochina, Africa, Middle East hadn’t really taken root. Also when the effort to de-anglacize Quebec was in full swing. That and the general shock of a young California girl moving to the land of ice and snow and a country(Canada) which was completing its full transition from a British Commonwealth to an anti-American identity under Trudeau . This had to have a serious impact on her

    So none of this was explored. I think in part because both Democrats and Republicans never considered her a serious person and so never did opposition research on her. However why did she never acknowledge very unique experience? The NY Times article pun it as very positive, you would think she would have pushed it during her “Summer of Joy” as a coming of age story. It is, to use the Sherlock Holmes quote, the dog that didn’t bark.

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