Where Does Kamala Harris’ Socialism Come From?

She got her politics from her father, Donald Harris. He got it from black nationalists and Soviet communists.

Donald J. Harris
Kamala Harris has a peculiar relationship with her father. The pair have been estranged for years, yet live a mile apart in Washington, D.C. On the campaign trail, she’s rarely evoked his name, even avoiding a direct jab at him at the September presidential debate. Yet more than anyone, Kamala Harris imbibed her socialist beliefs from Donald J. Harris, the fiery, Jamaican-born Marxist who spent 40 years teaching revisionist economics at Palo Alto’s Stanford University.

“A big part of the difficulties between them is that they’re so much alike,” a family friend told the New York Times earlier this month.

Harris’ thinking was deeply entrenched in Karl Marx’s outdated, disproven theories of wealth distribution and central control of the economy. 

What isn’t reported in the press is his interest in the fanatical Communists of the early Soviet Union and the violent radicals of the Nation of Islam.

From Russia with Love

In 1972, Harris penned the introduction to a reprint of an economics treatise by Nikolai Ivanovitch Bukharin, Vladimir Lenin’s favorite economist of the Communist Russian Revolution—which killed 12 million people and established the Soviet Union—and editor of the infamous newspaper Pravda (“Truth”).

Unlike Kamala, Bukharin was no champagne-sipping socialist; he championed the brutal murder of the Russian Tsar and his family, rising to Josef Stalin’s right-hand man until he himself was violently purged by Stalin and executed in 1938. Bukharin was a passionate crusader for the world Communist revolution, which he briefly pushed in the U.S. with a radical newspaper, Novy Mir (“New World”). Even Lenin proved too moderate for him, however, and he resigned from Pravda during World War I to urge a Communist revolution across Europe rather than an end to the war.Josef Stalin (left) & Nikolai Bukharin (right)
During the Russian Revolution, Bukharin wrote the textbook The ABC of Communism to encourage the violent overthrow of the tsarist government and the creation of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

“People used to say: `What is wholesome for a Russian is death to a German,'” Bukharin wrote. “It would, in fact, be more accurate to say: `What is wholesome for a worker is death to a landowner or capitalist.'”

The capitalist regime has now been overthrown in Russia. What Marx prophesied is being fulfilled under our very eyes. The old order is collapsing. The crowns are falling from the heads of kings and emperors. Everywhere the workers are advancing towards revolution, and towards the establishment of soviet rule: In order fully to understand how all this has come about, it is necessary to be thoroughly well acquainted with the nature of the capitalist system. Then we shall realize that its breakdown was inevitable. Once we grasp that there will be no return of the old system and that the victory of the workers is assured, we shall have full strength and confidence as we carry on the struggle on behalf of the new social order of the workers.

It's telling that Harris later authored the chapter on Bukharin in a 1990 encyclopedia, Marxian Economics, in which he hailed the murderous Communist “one of the most brilliant theoreticians in the Bolshevik movement and an outstanding figure in the history of Marxism.”

Bukharin, in fact, deeply influenced Lenin’s writings on “predatory” capitalism culminating in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), which calls for the forceful “decolonization” of the entire world.

The Communist economist is also credited as one of the chief authors—along with Stalin—of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, which banned all opposition to the Soviet Communist Party in the name of “democracy.”

Both charges should sound familiar to anyone who’s followed events in 2024, where the radical Left—spearheaded by Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Barack Obama—have demanded the “decolonization” of Israel and America and attempted to censor or imprison their political opponents in order to “save” democracy. They didn’t get those ideas in a vacuum.

(RELATED: Kamala’s Father Knew Mass Immigration Hurts Black Families. She Should've Listened to Him.)

Martin Luther King’s Evil Doppelganger

The radical black nationalist and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X was shot dead in February 1965 just days before he was due to give a talk urging black Americans to fight back against the “oppression of the white man.” Three months later, a hagiography of the man appeared in the Kingston, Jamaica Gleaner penned by Donald J. Harris, then a Ph.D. student at U.C. Berkeley.

“In his tragically short career Malcolm X Shabazz showed himself to by one of the most remarkable, enigmatic and brilliant figures to be produced by the Afro-American people,” Harris wrote. “In honoring him,” he added, quoting the black actor Ossie Davis, “we honor the best in ourselves.”

Entitled “Malcolm X: The man and his mission,” the two-part article celebrated his Civil Rights-era activism while castigating “the nightmare world of the Northern ghetto . . . [and] the terror of certain counties in the South,” where black Americans’ “daily experience consists of confronting the unscrupulous white landlord, the hostile white policeman, the insensitive white social worker, and, if he has a job, the arrogant white employer.”Malcolm X. Credit: Life magazine (1963)

“The failure of white America to appreciate these things,” Harris sermonized, “is but a reflection of its abysmal failure to understand the extent of the frustration, pain and anger of black America. . . . It is against this background that the man, Malcolm X, must be considered.”

Harris explains that he “had the privilege of knowing him personally and observing him in different situations. While his eloquence was electrifying he was no demagogue,” he added. “He had a gracefulness and charm which made him stand out” whether in the United Nations, among “his Muslim ‘brothers and sisters,’” or with a white audience.

Malcolm X was not part of the traditional Civil Rights movement associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., but rather the violent, radical arm that demanded total segregation—not integration—of whites and blacks “by any means necessary.” “You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution,” he said in 1963. “There is no such thing as a non-violent revolution.”

In order to create an entirely separate “black economy” and black political parties, he demanded a black “cultural revolution,” foreshadowing the infamous Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution launched a year after his murder.

That isn’t a stretch. While in prison in 1950, Malcolm X wrote a letter to President Harry Truman describing himself as a Communist. Communists, in fact, claim him as one of their own. “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic,” he said once of the decolonization efforts in Africa. “You show me a capitalist, I’ll show you a bloodsucker.”

“You can’t have capitalism without racism,” he told another group in Harlem.

We are living in an era of revolution, and the revolt of the American Negro is part of the rebellion against oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era . . . . It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.

Though he didn’t live to see it, the Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Party—founded a year after his death—was directly inspired by Malcolm X’s desire to use violence to fight white “fascism” in America, especially after King was killed.

If that sounds familiar in 2024, it should. The struggle between “fascist oppressor” and “oppressed victim” is the central theme in intersectionality, DEI, and Critical Race Theory, all grandchildren of the 1960s.

And in the ‘60s, the chief “oppressors” were the Jews, in Malcolm X’s opinion. He raged against “Zionist-Dollarism” and called liberal Jewish supporters of the Civil Rights movement “hypocrites” who were only “claiming to be friends of the black man” so they could derail “the real Black Revolution.” He accused them of “sapp[ing] the very life-blood of the so-called Negroes” and thwarting the uprising of the “22 million colonized Afro-Americans.”

Whereas King is remembered for his Ghandi-like pacifism, Malcom X said, “Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.” (Harris actually defends Malcolm X at this point by appealing to the Second Amendment “right of self-defense . . . guaranteed to every American citizen by the Constitution of the Second Amendment,” which Kamala Harris believes must be abolished.)

It isn’t hard to trace a direct path from the worst of the 1960s to the “social justice” nuts today. Obama was deeply influenced by Frank Marshall Davis, a devoted Communist who introduced Obama to Chicago politics. Similarly, Kamala Harris is the product of California Marxists, raised in hard-left politics in San Francisco and Montreal (another part of her life she’s strangely concealed).

The scary thing is that they used to hide this past from the American people. Now the masks are all off—and they aren’t going back on.

(READ MORE: Kamala Harris’ Reparations Will Cost Every Taxpayer $24,000)